Driftwood
by MarleeJames
Summary: Crossing Over 'verse. Season 7. For six months, Dean struggled with his feelings about Terry's choice and Sam struggled to find a way to help his brother deal with it. Neither really managed too well. Companion piece to Crossing Over. Season 7 references and spoilers. No slash. Rated M for language and adult concepts.
1. Chapter 1 When You Were Gone

**Driftwood**

* * *

**AN:**_ After agitating to my beta for a while about writing in the third person instead of first, this was her suggestion – what Dean went through over the six months when Terry went back to her old life at Cas' insistence. It's a test for me, so I hope you like it and if you do, let me know! Again my thanks to BlackIceWitch for her cover art for this story which I think is awesome, and for being a wonderful beta. Any mistakes left over, all mine!  
_

* * *

**Chapter 1 When You Were Gone**

* * *

Dean skidded to a dusty halt less than two feet from the angel and demon, looking wildly around, Sam beside him doing the same thing.

"We had a deal," Crowley was snarling at Castiel.

"I brought her down," the angel said with a straight face. "That was the deal."

"You sent her back!"

"She asked to go," Cas disagreed, looking past the King of Hell at the demon cloud hovering over the yard. "I had no choice."

"This isn't over," Crowley promised him, swinging around, his black coat flying out. He gestured sharply at the cloud and it too wheeled around, flowing back over the fence and trees and powerlines to the east as the demon vanished mid-stride.

"The hell's Terry, Cas?!" Dean asked abruptly.

"She's safe. In her old life," Castiel told him. "She knew she didn't belong here. She didn't want to die."

"No," Dean said, looking at Sam for confirmation as he felt his doubt growing. "She wouldn't have just given up like that, right?"

Sam didn't answer. Dean saw his brother's uncertainty. Terry had been swept into their life, their world. Only one thing had held her here and he'd thought it'd been enough but what the hell did he know? He hadn't made any promises. He hadn't said anything.

"She asked me to take her home, Dean," Cas said quietly. "I had to do it. Crowley wants her soul, but not for Hell."

"What the hell's that mean?" Bobby interjected, reaching them. "What good's her soul to him?"

"It's a source of power," the angel said, his gaze on Dean. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well, her choice, right?" Dean said, looking at the yard's gates. "She'll be safer there."

"Dean –" Sam was looking at him, he could feel his brother's concern boring into his back.

"Car needs an oil change," he said, turning for the workshop. "See if you can find us a job."

He walked across the yard and made himself get into the Impala, start the engine and drive her carefully into Bobby's shed, catching sight of the small group standing and watching him in the rear view mirror.

She would be safer there. Crowley couldn't get his hands on her there, he thought, turning off the engine and getting out, looking around for what he needed. Hell, if he'd known about that choice, he'd have sent her himself. It was better this way.

He realised he was staring at the oil drum without moving and started toward it, pulling off his coat automatically and rolling up his sleeves.

Definitely better this way.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**One week later.**_

The house was quiet and dark, but still full of reminders. He'd never even seen the damned room he was sitting in before she'd gotten here and rearranged Bobby's entire place. He got up from the sofa restlessly, picking up the bottle and swigging a mouthful from the neck as he walked to the window.

Gone was good. Gone meant he didn't have to worry about what might happen. What _would_ happen, he thought bitterly. Gone was better than dead (_like Ellen and Jo and Pamela and Ash and Rufus_).

Stumbling over something between the sofa and the low table, Dean looked down, seeing the small leather backpack lying on the floor, half under the table. He put the bottle down and dropped back onto the sofa, lifting it up and opening the flap reluctantly. Even not here, it was still hers and his curiosity, fanned by something deeper, was battling with the sense that he had no right to look at what the bag held.

A scattering of stuff fell out onto the table when he tipped it up. The notes that interleaved the bulging journal lay loosely over a set of keys, a silkily soft, old leather wallet, a couple of small notebooks, one fallen open, the handwriting neat and slightly slanted. There wasn't much of the bag's owner lying there and he wasn't sure if he was relieved about that…or disappointed. Opening the wallet, he looked at the driver's licence in the clear window. The room was too dark to make out any detail. Most people's licence pictures looked like crap anyway. Still, he angled it to the window's dim glow, letting it fall when he realised he was trying to see detail that wasn't there.

_So you accepted the guilt for what you did in Hell, you embraced it and submerged yourself in it because it justified not even allowing yourself to think about any of things that were hurting you, pretending to yourself that you didn't need to think about them, that you couldn't have them…_

When she'd said it to him, he'd felt himself withdraw and close up and he'd left. Driving aimlessly and without a destination through the night, he'd known that it was all true. It'd taken some time to admit to it, but that had been more because she'd known it, had seen it, somehow.

He'd wanted to tell her that he'd thought about it. Had wanted to tell her that he was trying not to feel that way. And Cas had shown up.

He walked into the hall and stood there indecisively. He'd tried sleeping. Behind his closed lids, memory came and drove sleep away. The whiskey had muted his senses but nothing else.

_Dean, if there's anything about me you like, anything at all, could you tell me what it is, right now?_

Closing his eyes against the sound of that voice in his head, he swung around and walked to the front door. He couldn't stay here. Not for Bobby and not for Sam. He needed to be doing something.

The Impala started up straight away, the engine's deep rumble as it pulled out of the auto yard both comforting and familiar, and he turned right, heading south without a destination.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Two weeks after that.**_

Dean was cruising, one hand on the wheel and the other tuning the dial for something other than the farm report to listen to. His breakfast sat comfortably in his stomach and the full night's sleep after days of not much at all had given him a sense that maybe, just maybe, he was doing the right thing. Catching the tail end of _Back in Black_, he left the station as it was and looked back at the road.

"_And now for the news of the weird – two very odd murders, to be exact. Mediums are dying in Lily Dale, the most psychic town in America. So if you want to know your future...stick to that nine hundred line, 'cause is it me, or should those guys have seen it coming?_"

_Most psychic town in America?_ Lily Dale was nine hours in the other direction and he made the u-turn efficiently, the engine roaring with its comforting familiarly through his hands and feet.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The Good Graces Café sported a profusion of ferns with a backdrop of varnished pine. Looking at the blackboard on the far wall as he walked in, he could feel the desire to roll his eyes strengthen. "_Special of the Day: You!_" it proclaimed in large, colourful, chalk lettering. Under that was "_Soup of the Day: A State of Bliss_".

His brother liked places like this. He usually couldn't find anything to eat on the menu. It was a bad idea. He was hesitating at the short flight of steps when a man materialised beside him.

"Hello!" Tall and lanky, radiating what had to be a forced bonhomie, the cheery grin of the middle-aged waiter was nauseating at this time of morning. "First time at Good Graces?"

"Yeah," Dean allowed warily.

"Well, we're a hundred percent locally sourced, biodynamic, and you get a free affirmation with every order," the waiter babbled at him, nodding enthusiastically at each point. The accent sounded more Californian than New York and Dean noticed that the waiter's eyes were creepily focussed on something just past his right shoulder.

"Think I'll source a taco joint," he said, backing a step away from the dude.

"All right," the waiter said agreeably, turning to another customer. Dean exhaled with a sense of danger just missed and started to turn back for the door.

"Just coffee, black, extra shot."

He stopped, recognising the voice. Sam. Taking a step to one side, he looked around the multi-level room and saw him sitting at a table, eyes glued to a file in front of him.

"You always wear a suit to get your palm read?" he asked, walking over to the table. Sam looked up, his expression flattening out. Ignoring that, Dean nodded and reached for a chair on the other side.

"Yeah. Not surprised you caught this one. It's on every morning zoo in America. You mind?"

He pulled out the chair and sat, not waiting for an answer to that. He could see his brother debating the correct course of action and decided he didn't want to see any of the possibilities.

"So, I, uh, I went to the scene. Wires, speakers, enough EMF to make your hair stand up. Don't even think about getting a reading. Oh, and, uh, if this hadn't have been two psychics that bit it...I would have just chalked this up as being, uh, dumb and accidental. And I know, I know. This whole town's supposedly calling ghosts. But that takes some serious spell work and some serious mojo. The only books this lady had were Oprah crap. When was the last time you actually saw a real psychic? Huh? Pamela? Missouri?"

The obnoxiously cheerful waiter materialised again, this time standing between them. "And what can I get for you?"

"Uh, pancakes, side of pig. Coffee, black," he told him, looking at Sam.

"Fantastic. You are a virile manifestation of the divine," the waiter gushed adoringly, spinning around and heading for the kitchen.

"What the hell did he say to me?" Dean looked after him, brows drawing together.

"That was your affirmation," Sam told him curtly. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Around," he answered. "Got a ghost in North Carolina."

"Hunting. On your own," Sam said, his face and voice expressionless. "And you couldn't let us know."

Dean looked away. "It was a – a spur of the moment thing."

"Right."

"What do you think of this?" he asked, waving a hand toward the window and street, hoping that the blatant change of subject would get them past the awkwardness of the moment. Sam might let it go for now, he thought, but not forever.

"I think if we're working this job together, then I want to know what happened."

"Don't make this into a federal case, Sam."

"I'm asking what happened," Sam repeated patiently, with the air of a man prepared to wait until Judgement Day.

"Do you want order some herbal tea?" Dean asked him sarcastically. "Maybe dim the lighting? We could hold hands and look into each other's eyes?"

"We used to talk about this stuff."

Looking at the table top, Dean let his breath escape in long exhale at the non-reactive tone in Sam's voice. He was right. They'd never been all that great at it, but back in the day, they'd actually tried to hear each other out. Back when trust had never been an issue. Back when all they'd had was each other.

"I didn't have this much scar tissue back then," he pointed out, keeping his tone light. The anger was still there, hiding for the moment under Sam's long-suffering look. He'd been a dick to leave without saying anything, but at the time, he couldn't have said a word and he had a feeling Sam already knew that. "I, uh, I'm sorry. I just needed some time to – uh – think, that's all."

"No one thought you –"

"Can we skip this bit?" Dean asked. He'd apologised, wasn't that enough? "Two murders in a town full of fake psychics."

He hadn't needed time to think. He'd needed to get away from the sympathetic looks, from having to see his brother with Lauren, from Bobby's thoughtful expressions whenever he'd looked at the current level of the bottles on the old-fashioned sideboard next to the TV. He'd had to get away from not sleeping and the ache that seemed to be present no matter what he did, from turning corners in the old house and the raw expectations that hadn't gone away, even with time.

The ghost in Raleigh had sure seen his lack of attention. He'd had to focus on the job and that had been better than drinking. It'd left him tired enough to sleep.

"Alright," Sam said, pulling out a couple of photographs from the open file. "Looks like a cursed necklace."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Two days later**_

Dean rubbed his brow, visualising what Sam had just told him. "In the bed? They were _in_ the bed?"

"Yeah," Sam confirmed, grimacing slightly as he drank his coffee.

The café was full, low conversation, the clink of china, colour and movement all around them. Dean scanned the room, mentally comparing this scene with Melanie's home two hours ago and made an effort to push those thoughts aside.

"Ugh. I can't believe he was boning her," he said to Sam, one side of his mouth lifting up as he saw him wince.

"Dean," Sam groaned.

He was saved from having to justify the bad joke by the waiter's appearance at the table.

"Can I get you anything else?"

Looking down at his cup, Dean nodded. "Uh, just a refill." He looked back up at the waiter as the man opened his mouth. "And if you affirmate me, I'm gonna punch you in the face," he added threateningly, seeing his brother suppressing a smile from the corner of his eye.

"All righty then," the waiter said with an uncertain smile. "Coffee, coming up!"

"I can't wait to get out of this frickin' fortune cookie," Dean grumbled. For a second, he felt the guide's hand on his arm again. _I'm sorry, I don't normally do this during business hours, but do you know an Eleanor... or an Ellen? She seems quite concerned about you. She wants to tell you – pardon me – if you don't tell someone how bad it really is, she'll kick your ass from beyond. You have to trust someone again eventually._

He shivered. Yeah, he knew someone called Ellen. Knew an Ellen who'd been dying to kick his ass when she'd been alive. He had trusted. Too many times. It wasn't that easy to keep offering himself and getting knifed for his trouble.

_Everybody leaves you, Dean. You noticed? Mommy. Daddy. Even Sam. You ever ask yourself why? Maybe it's not them. Maybe, it's you._

He'd known it wasn't his mother, known it was another dick angel trick, to break him down, to make him quit…it hadn't stopped the pain from twisting inside, and it had broken something. Something he hadn't been able to look at back then. Something he'd thought might've been healing, very slowly, over the last few months. Something that was going to stay broken now.

"Dean," Sam's voice cut through that thought and he looked up. Sam was looking at the door.

Melanie stood there, head turning as she searched the crowded room. Dean lifted his hand, and she saw them.

"I'm gonna go, um... do something outside," Sam said, getting up.

Watching him walk for the door, passing the dark-haired girl, Dean forced his expression to stay neutral. He got up as she came up to the table.

"Hi."

Smiling at him, she said, "Hi, you didn't stick around so I could say thank you."

"Have a seat," he said, waving a hand at the chair opposite. "No reason to thank me."

"You saved my life," she said, sitting down and looking at him quizzically.

Shrugging and looking at the cup on the table, he said, "Yeah, but not your friend's."

"Sometimes, things aren't as clear as we'd like them to be," she told him. He looked back at her. "You and Sam seem a little better."

"You could tell that from the walk up?" he asked, surprised.

"Take it or leave it," she said with another smile. "Also guessing you're not so keen to come visit here again, so...this is goodbye. Wish we'd met on a better week."

Belatedly, he saw that she meant that. The realisation brought no other feeling than a vague dissatisfaction. She was all wrong. Too tall. Her eyes were brown. She knew nothing about him, even with the psychic flashes. She never would. He looked away.

"I don't have better weeks," he told her, a little abruptly.

"Oh."

He heard the disappointment in her voice and forced himself to look back, smile a bit. "But hey, who knows right? Can't tell the future."

She relaxed a little and reached across the table to take his hand. "Hmm."

His teeth clamped together at the light touch and he closed his eyes, willing himself not to snatch it back.

"Finally," Melanie said, her voice deeper and rougher.

Opening his eyes, he saw her looking at him. "What?"

"Would it kill you boys to at least try to stay in touch?" Melanie asked, staring at him.

"Wh- Ellen?" He frowned, pulling back a little on his hand. Melanie's grip tightened.

"I don't have much time," she said. "You got the message, Dean. Don't keep it all inside."

"I –"

"Oh," Melanie said, cutting him off as she released his hand. "Did I vague out on you? Sorry."

He drew his hand away. "That's alright. You see anything?"

"Well," she said. "Your palm's a bit weird. Both life and love lines are broken up by your job."

He smothered the desire to laugh. It wasn't that funny.

"See, here?" She leaned a bit closer to his hand. "Twice you've given up love for your job. And you've been closing to losing your life four times." She touched the points where the career line crossed the major life lines.

Not to mention the times he actually had, he thought with a fizzing spurt of sour amusement.

"What else?"

"This line here," she said, pointing to a short curved line under his index finger. "Not many people have that. It's called the Ring of Solomon."

"Yeah?"

She glanced up at his dry tone. "I've only seen it twice actually. It marks the ability to give up your needs for the greater good," she told him, her eyes searching his. "Give up what you want to save the world."

Drawing in a deeper breath, Dean looked down at the small line. "Can I get it removed?"

She laughed, but her expression was doubtful. He smiled, to show her that he was just kidding. Not that he was, but people invariably took the things he said to them the wrong way. She smiled back, relief in her eyes, and looked down at his hand again.

"This is interesting," she added, tracing a fingertip along the deep crease that ran from below his index finger to the edge of his palm. "There's an overlap here, see that? It's broken but it picks up exactly parallel to the first line? Like a second chance."

Looking down at the line, Dean gently pulled his hand free. "I doubt it."

She looked up at him. His tone had been curt. "I'm sorry."

"No need," he told her, shifting back in his chair dismissively. "That's not right anyway," he added, not sure why he felt compelled to tell her. "The second time, I didn't give up."

"Oh." Melanie looked at the door uncomfortably. "I should be going, I've got a client coming," she said, getting up from the chair. "Thanks, and take care of yourself."

He nodded, getting up as well and leaving a bill on the table. "You too."

Giving her a minute's head start to leave the café, he closed the hand she'd held into a loose fist, as if that would erase what she'd seen. There were no second chances in his life, and he hadn't been the one to give up.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the obnoxiously cheerful waiter hovering and he walked for the door. He wanted out of this town, the sooner the better.

Sam was waiting by the Impala and Dean watched in surprise as his brother threw his bags into the back seat. Sam caught the look.

"Thought it was about time to do Vegas," Sam said casually.

Vegas, Dean thought. It'd been two years since they'd been there on their agreed sacred vacation from the life. Most of the trips lasted three or four days, enough time to wipe out whatever funds they had and leave him with a hangover that took at least two days to work out of his system. He wondered if he could work up enough enthusiasm to fool his brother.

"Sure, Vegas."

"I rang Lauren, told her we needed some family time," Sam said, opening the passenger door. "Just like old times, right? No shop-talk, no hunting."

"Yeah, I remember," Dean remarked, getting into the driver's side. "Why?"

Sam glanced across at him. "We could use a vacation."

Starting the car, Dean looked up and down the street for traffic and pulled out, considering the idea. It might be what he needed. A few days off, no responsibilities, a bit of blackjack, shooting craps, hanging out with his brother…he couldn't see anything to argue about with that.

"Sounds like a plan."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

From Lily Dale, the drive was more than two days, and Dean thought of everything Sam had talked about over that time when he saw the distant mirage of the desert city, hovering against the darkness.

He'd been surprised, a bit, at Sam's honesty. After the last couple of years, he'd gotten kind of used hearing only what his brother thought he could handle, the secretive streak in Sam that had manifested early in his wacked-out childhood, abandoned as the road unwound in front of them.

He had forgiven Sam for choosing Ruby, for thinking that the blood could somehow make evil into good. He couldn't tell him that the trust that had been blown to bits at that time wasn't back. He wasn't sure it would ever come back. He understood what had driven his brother, and he understood that Sam would be looking for some way to make that right, maybe for the rest of his life, but it wasn't something he could give freely again with the way he'd felt, about himself, about his family.

"I thought I'd destroyed any hope of being brothers again, you know," Sam had said, and he'd been able to feel his brother's worried look, lasering the side of his head. "It wasn't until Terry told me that you'd forgiven me that I realised I had another chance."

It'd brought Sam out of the Hell memories, and he couldn't be happier about that. He'd wondered how she'd known that would do it. She knew more about the two of them than even the superfans of Chuck's books, but at the same time, in other ways, in the day-to-day ways, he guessed, she didn't know them all that well. It was confusing, that disparity. It suggested things that he knew now weren't actually true.

At night, in his dreams, she talked to him. About his past. About hers, sometimes. He tried to hold onto those dreams, but they always turned into something else after a while. Something he'd learned to dread, the demon cloud over the yard and Crowley's threats and Cas saying he was sorry but she'd wanted to go.

He wasn't having much success in the attempts to convince himself that it was better this way. He could say it out loud all day long and at the back of his mind he could feel the stab of loss and of betrayal and some part of him, standing there bewildered, like a kid who's just lost everything he dreamed of, not knowing why or how it'd happened so fast, in the blink of an eye it'd all been gone.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	2. Chapter 2 Six Weeks

**Chapter 2 Six Weeks**

* * *

Sam had hung around the motel for half a day, then had pulled on a pair of desert boots and had clomped out the door, waving cheerfully and saying he'd be back in five days.

Dean stared at the beer in his hand morosely. _Need time to think about life_, his brother had said. _And you need to have some fun_.

He looked around the club, splashy red and blue and gold lights falling over smooth curves and sparkling outfits, the music a little bit too loud, the lights a little bit too bright and the girls gyrating and twisting on the raised stage as uninspiring as the sight of the Strip in the merciless, hard light of the day. Oh, yeah. _Fun_.

They were all beautiful. Vegas only did knockouts, at least for public performances. Endlessly long legs, toned and smooth because they all had dancing jobs on one chorus or another in the casino shows. Full, perfectly-shaped breasts that bounced and jiggled and swayed with each turn and dip. Flat stomachs and slender waists and curving hips, mostly oiled and glittered and on display.

"You want another?"

He looked at the waitress standing beside the table and nodded, tossing back the last half-inch in the bottle and handing it to her. Why not?

Starting in the MGM, he'd played for a couple of hours, his heart not in it. The last time they'd been here, it'd been a high, all the people, the dreams and excitement that permeated the air along with the blue clouds of cigarette smoke, it had all filled him with a reckless feeling of being young, being…someone else. Free drinks, great food, pretty girls and so much din that thinking was near impossible. This time, it was too much. He didn't see excitement, he saw desperation, people who wanted more than they'd ever get, people who were looking for something they could never have. Like him.

"You wanna talk about it?"

The waitress was back, setting the fresh drink onto the table at his elbow. She was tall, platinum-blonde, straight hair cut just above her shoulders. Big, blue eyes and pale, pink lips. She wore a white tank top cut low and cropped and jeans that clung to her hips in defiance of the law of gravity.

"Talk about what?" he asked, picking up the beer to hide the fact that he really wished she'd put it down and left without a word.

"Whatever it is that has you in a strip club at six o'clock on a weekday, not looking at the girls and staring into space instead," she said, leaning on the table. "I hear talking about it helps."

_You need to have fun_, Sam said in his head. He agreed. He did. Just…this wasn't the kind of fun he could deal with right now.

"Some other time," he said, reaching with relief into his coat pocket as his phone beeped insistently. He looked at the message, peripherally aware of her leaving, chin lifted to an angle that left him in no doubt that she thought he was an ungrateful asshole.

_10:23pm_

_From: Sammy_

_348 Twain Ave_

_WEAR FED SUIT!_

What the hell…?

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Dean stared at the bright neon sign, brow creased up perplexedly. Surrounded by glowing red love-hearts, it read, 'A Little White Chapel'. Under that there was something about Joan Collins and Michael Jordan but he couldn't take that in. Under that was a curling banner announcing a twenty-four hour drive-up wedding window.

The hell was Sammy doing here, he wondered as he walked past the sign toward the doors. Demons? Haunting? Shapeshifter? Vampire? None of them seemed to fit the gaudiness of the Vegas quickie wedding establishment.

He pushed open the door and stepped inside. The hall was tiled in black and white squares and he walked along it cautiously, checking for shadows, for movement, for flickering lights. At the other end, a pair of cream and gilt double doors were closed and he drew the automatic from his suit coat, pulling back the slide and hearing the reassuring click as a round loaded.

The entire building seemed completely silent and even the soft scrape of his shoes sounded inordinately loud in that waiting quiet. He was no closer to figuring out what Sam had found here, and the plethora of possibilities was making his nerves crawl. Reaching out to the handles, his fingers had scarcely touched the metal when both flew open and he found himself staring at his brother, the muscles of his trigger finger thrumming with tension as he stopped himself from firing, Sam's expression a strange mix of astonishment and impatience.

"Good, you're here." Sam reached out and pushed the barrel of the automatic down, shaking his head. "It's okay, you won't need that. Come on."

More than slightly mystified, Dean uncocked the gun and thumbed on the safety, returning it to his inside pocket as he followed Sam through the chapel. By the organ, a man and woman sat side by side, both reading. Sam stopped by a small table and picked up a pink carnation.

"I thought you were, uh, out, you know," Dean said, looking around the room. "Becoming one with the land and that crap?"

"Come here."

He looked down as Sam reached out and grabbed the lapel of his coat, pinning the flower to it.

"What's this?"

"Um…apparently pink is for loyalty," Sam said distractedly as he took a step back and looked at the effect. "There."

"What's going on?" Dean asked, glancing down at the froth of pink petals on his chest and back at his brother. "Siren? What is it?"

"No," Sam said. "No, no, nothing like that." He raised his gaze and met Dean's eyes. "All right…so it's a little sudden, but life is short. And I'll keep this shorter," he added, looking at his watch.

Dean frowned as Sam pulled in a breath.

"I'm in love. And I'm getting married."

"Lauren's here?" Dean asked, looking around again.

"No," Sam said, tucking his chin down to his chest. "Uh, it's not Lauren."

"What?"

"Aren't you going to say anything better than that?" Sam asked. "Like, uh, 'congratulations' for starters?"

"What?!" Dean repeated, staring at him. "Sam, what about –"

The woman got up from her chair and went to sit at the organ, cracking her knuckles. Sam turned away and looked at the doors as the opening bars of Wagner's Bridal Chorus filled the room.

"Sam!"

"Not now," Sam said, his attention locked on the open doors and the hallway beyond them. Turning, Dean saw a woman walking down the hall, most of her wedding dress, bouquet and face hidden beneath a thick veil of tulle.

"Who the hell is that?" Dean whispered to his brother. As she came closer he realised it wasn't just the perspective of the hallway. She was short. Really quite short.

She stopped in front of Sam and he leaned forward, lifting the layers of veil over her head.

Dean felt his mouth drop open as the woman turned to look at him with a wide smile.

"Becky?"

"Dean, I'm so glad you're here," Becky Rosen gushed as she slipped her arm through Sam's, both turning to face the celebrant.

"Sam!" he hissed.

"In a minute," Sam said, looking down adoringly into Becky's upturned face. "This is forever."

Dean flinched back involuntarily. What the hell was going on? What the HELL was he going to tell Lauren…and Bobby? HOW THE _HELL_ had his brother gotten conned when he'd only left him alone for five days?

The service was short and to the point and Dean missed most of it, his brain feverishly trying to come up with some rational reason for what he was unwillingly witnessing. He'd wanted Sam to find someone, fall in love, get married, have a family…and up till one minute ago, he'd thought his brother had. The intelligent, beautiful and willowy nephilim had seemed to him to be Sam's ideal partner, and he would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that his brother had been going deep.

"You may now kiss the bride," the celebrant said loudly, the organ bursting in on top of the last word in a joyous flourish of notes. Dean watched as Sam bent nearly double to kiss Becky, turning away at the sight.

When they broke apart, he struggled for something to say that would get him any kind of answer at all. "Shouldn't she ask for my permission or something?"

Sam frowned. "Y-you want her to ask for my hand?"

"How in the-how did this happen?" Dean asked, trying to flush that image down deep.

"Short version?" Sam said, his arm curling around Becky. Dean could see that to most it would look more like a head-lock than an embrace. "We-we-we met. We ate and – and talked and fell in love. And, you know, here we are."

Shaking his head slightly, Dean said, "Yeah, I-I guess I'm all caught up."

"Dean, look, it's simple. If- if something good's happening, I-I got to jump on it – now, today, uh, period," Sam told him, the faint stutter coming and going as excitement filled his face and voice.

Dean resisted the impulse to roll his eyes. "Okay. Fine." He looked at Becky. "No offence, but did you make sure she's even really –"

"Salt, holy water, everything. See?" she said firmly, pushing aside the tulle veil to hold her arm up. A thin cut had scabbed over. "Not a monster. Just the right girl for your brother."

The wince was harder to hide. "Ah."

Becky nodded enthusiastically. "That's it."

The celebrant came up behind them, clearing his throat discreetly. "The bill."

Becky reached for it. "I got it. You two do your brother thing."

Dean watched her walk out of earshot and rounded back on Sam. "Really?! Superfan ninety-nine?!" He rubbed a hand over his face. "Christ, Sam, what about Lauren?"

"Dean, look," Sam said earnestly. "Honest to God, I-I had the exact same opinion of her as you do. But when we got past the whole book thing, I found out t-that she's great and I was the dick." He looked at Becky. "We have more in common than I do with Lauren…I don't know…I just look at her and I don't want to be apart from her for even a minute. And she's all human."

Dumbfounded, Dean stared at him. He tried to regroup his thoughts. "Yeah, you know, speaking of the whole, uh, book thing...Becky randomly shows up during Vegas week?"

"Yeah," Sam sighed, his expression dreamily fatuous. "Amazing, huh?"

"Oh, yeah," Dean agreed sardonically.

"Okay, um, what are you trying to say?" Sam looked at him, his forehead beginning to wrinkle up.

"I'm saying maybe she knew you were gonna be here. Maybe, uh…um…Chuck wrote about it," Dean pointed out reasonably. They hadn't read all the books, the sense of living their lives twice too disorienting. But Chuck had seen pretty much everything there was to see, including the one-time, regular-as-clockwork annual vacation.

"Dean, you're paranoid," Sam said flatly.

"And you're in love?!" Dean retorted. "With _her_, having _somehow_ forgotten that you were in love with _Lauren_. Sam, it's been five days, man!"

Sam's attention sharpened on him. "You know what, Dean? You know what? Um, how about this? Becky and I are gonna go up to her place in Delaware," he said, annoyance leaking out as he looked at his brother. "Um, why don't you try and wrap your dome around this, get a little supportive, then give us a call?"

He slapped him on the shoulder and walked over to Becky, offering her his arm and not looking back as they walked out of the chapel.

This-this-this whatever it was, was not happening, he thought, following more slowly. He pulled out his phone as he exited the building and walked back to the car, hitting the speed dial button then cancelling the call before it could ring. Bobby was hunting a nest in Oregon. What if Lauren found out? What the fuck was he going to tell her about this?

_Nothing_, he decided. What she didn't know wouldn't hurt her, and he'd figure this out and get his brother back to normal ASAP.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Vegas to Delaware was a three day drive. Of course, Sam and Becky had just taken her rental to the airport and gotten on a plane. He'd watched the goddamned thing take off and turned sourly for the parking lot.

And Lauren called when he just crossing into Utah.

"Hey."

"_Hi Dean, is Sam with you?_" Lauren asked, her voice robbed of its usual warmth over the staticky line. "_He said you guys were going to be together after Lily Dale? I can't get through on his phone._"

"Ah," he hedged, looking at the empty passenger seat of the Impala as if it might give him an answer. "Uh, yeah, he's here, but we had…um…we had a big night and he's sleeping it off. I'll get him to call you when he's up, okay?"

"_Dean, I just –_"

"Whoa, gotta go, Lauren, big fender-bender ahead – cops, ambulance," Dean said, his face screwing up with the effort of the lie. "Uh, I'll call you later."

"_But –_"

He hit the end call button and tossed the phone on the console, eyes narrowed as he stared at the empty road ahead of him. Goddammit, how'd he up end up in this position?

Throwing a fast glance back at the phone, he picked it up and turned it off. It would buy him a bit of time, he thought. Time to come up with a decent lie that he could hold together until he worked out what the hell was going on.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

By the time he reached Hays, he admitted to himself he was done. A blue and gold neon sign blinked invitingly against the darkness at him and he hit the off ramp without a second thought, turning into the motel's drive and stopping at the office all by rote.

The room was a large single, with a glaring brown, orange and lime-green colour scheme and he turned off the overhead light hastily as the colours were seared into his brain.

He thought he was too tired to do anything but pull off his boots and fall onto the bed, turning off the lamp without looking, but after five minutes lying on the bed in the black and grey shadows of the room, he discovered that his brain wasn't going to turn off that easy, no matter how tired he felt, and the second he acknowledged that, his stomach started to grumble about the lack of food it'd had through the course of the day.

Turning the light back on, he looked at his watch. He'd left Vegas at two in the morning, a couple of hours behind Becky and Sam. It was seven now, earlier than he'd thought. Sitting up, he looked at the scattering of menus that covered the nightstand and grabbed the one for a local pizza place.

Phoning in the order took three minutes. Going back out to the car to retrieve the six-pack of warm beers from the back seat took another five. He put the beer into the fridge and looked at the bathroom. A shower might take long enough for both pizza to arrive and beverage to cool to a reasonable drinking temperature, he decided.

His clothes fell in a heap on the floor and he left the door open. For a change, the shower was hot and had plenty of water pressure, and he stood there under it, making an occasional swipe with the soap as the heat soaked into him and the hard spray gave a sort of a massage up and down his back. It was almost fifteen minutes later that the hot began to get less hot and he turned off the taps reluctantly, stepping out and grabbing both towels provided.

The pizza arrived as he pulled a clean tee shirt over his head, and the smells from it filled the room immediately, more stomach gurgles and rumbles reminding him needlessly that he was starving, felt more or less human again, and still had to figure out what had happened to Sam.

He ran through his memories of watching his brother with Lauren as he pulled off the slices and chewed and swallowed. There was no way that Sam wasn't head over heels, he thought. His brother didn't wear his heart on his sleeve by any means, but he wasn't careful about his expressions when he thought no one was watching and the two of them sat closer together than friends would…they listened to each other…they disappeared for hours at a time…

He'd noticed a lot but he knew he'd missed a lot as well. He'd been watching someone else, when she wasn't aware of it. He didn't know how she'd gone from being a pain-in-the-ass tag-along who knew too much about him to being…something else, but he knew the exact moment it'd happened. The back room of that bar in Oregon, listening to Eve's hybrid monsters searching for them. Pressed close together and he'd looked down at her when they'd gone and met her eyes, and she wasn't Dorothy any more.

Putting the slice down, he got up and went to the fridge, retrieving a now-tepid but at least not warm, beer and knocking the top off.

He'd done his best to convince himself that it'd been a physical attraction and that was it. Done his best to point out to himself all the things that had annoyed him about her, starting with the fact that despite giving them a blue print for the future, things went wrong and it wasn't the advantage that he'd thought it'd be. He'd reminded himself that Sam still had the feelings of being married to her and that she seemed to pretty comfortable with his brother and that even though he'd known, in that long, drawn-out moment, that what he'd felt had been reciprocated all the way, it was just a physical thing.

Tipping his head back, he swallowed another mouthful of beer and looked at the remains of the pizza on the table.

When he'd gone to get Lisa and Ben, he'd been sure that he was past it. Until he'd put his arms around her to get her aiming the damned gun properly, and it'd all come back, roaring back, with the smell and the feel of her hair and her skin filling his senses as he'd sighted along the gun barrel, his cheek against hers and her finger under his on the trigger. Lisa had seen it, straight away it seemed. The arguments they'd had while she and Ben had been in Bobby's house had all stemmed from that.

It took him longer to admit that Terry was easy to talk to. In some backward-assed kind of way, maybe because she already knew most of his past, he'd been able to trust that she wouldn't use what she'd seen against him, wouldn't throw what he said back at him. He wasn't sure about that but it'd felt…like a conviction at the time. A truth. He'd been just about comatose with whiskey the night after he and Sam had gotten back from making sure that Ben was going to live, at the hospital. He had the memory of her sitting there, beside him, listening to him. And he remembered that he'd wanted her there. That he hadn't wanted to be alone with all his guilt and his load of fucking misery.

The bottle was empty and he set it back on the table. None of that mattered now, did it? Gone was gone. The second wind from the food and shower was winding down, and a look at his watch showed it was past nine.

He opened the laptop and stared at the search screen, then started typing. Had to be a spell, he thought. The numbers of hits that were returned were staggering and he started to refine the criteria, bit by bit, reading through the promising-looking results. Had to be something easy to slip his brother. Something powerful. Powerful enough to override Sam's existing feelings.

By midnight, the last dregs of his little remaining energy had gone. He closed the computer and walked to the bed, pulling off his jeans and dragging the covers back this time. There were some spells that could do what he thought had been done to Sam, he'd found. They were top-shelf magic and he couldn't begin to imagine Becky being able to access them, or pull them off. He wondered if she knew what was going on or if someone else was pulling the strings here.

Behind his closed eyelids, images whirled and spun and settled onto one. It'd been a moment that he'd saved and hoarded and it hurt to look at but he couldn't help it. Merciful sleep drew him down into its undertow in moments and he slept, the image vanishing back into his subconscious, too tired for any kind of dreams, for once.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Four messages flashed accusingly on Dean's phone as he pulled onto Becky's street and peered out the window at the building numbers. Rising in volume, invective and incredulity, Lauren's voice had cracked on the last one. He felt like a total douche not responding to any of them, but he liked the alternative even less. Trying to explain this was going to be a nightmare he'd just as soon leave for a future date.

The apartment block appeared to his left and he pulled into a vacant slot along the kerb, turning off the engine and sitting there for a minute. On the passenger side of the long bench seat, a large box was festively decorated with a bright, fire-engine red bow and ribbon. Beneath that finery, the box claimed to hold a waffle iron. If they didn't like waffles, Dean thought nervously, Sam could use it as a weapon. Thing weighed a ton.

He couldn't buy Becky being a witch. He'd met a few dumb ones in his time, but they'd had help. The memory of the little coven stopped him as he opened the door and reached back for the box. She might not be at the top of the pile, but he didn't think she was dumb enough to have made a deal for that power. She was, after all, Chuck's Number One fan. She'd read the books.

He walked up the path and followed the signs to apartment seven, pressing the buzzer.

Sam opened the door and looked at him warily.

"Me being supportive," he said, mustering all the sincerity he could. "Congratulations to you and the missus."

"Thanks," Sam said, letting go of the door as Dean held out the box to him. His forehead creased up at the weight of it.

"It's a waffle iron," Dean said, unnecessarily since the box was covered in pictures and descriptions of it. "Non-stick. Yeah, you just, uh..."

He frowned at the pictures on the side of the box he could see…two handles, a dial, a cable. He couldn't quite imagine how it made the waffles, but there'd be instructions in the damned box, surely?

"I actually don't know how to use it. Are we good?" he said, giving up on the idea of explaining it.

Sam smiled and shrugged, stepping back to let him past. The apartment was small and vibrantly painted, a different eye-searing shade for each small room, the ceilings and trim all painted white, giving the impression of children's blocks, Dean thought. Or a Rubik cube. He squinted unconsciously at the Jamaican lime walls of the living room.

"Good, 'cause I'm sniffing a case in this town. The score is...guy wins Powerball, gets squished by a truck. Second guy went from the bench to the majors. Oh, and one week later, his face was the catcher's mitt, huh?"

"Our first thought was crossroads demons, but there's that ten-year time frame on collecting souls," Becky called out from the bedroom.

Dean looked around. Sam walked past him, pushing a partly open framed glass door aside to reveal another room, this one painted in something that wasn't quite cranberry. On the far wall, a map, several photographs and news clippings had been stuck. In front of them, Becky stood, one hand on her hip, brows draw together.

"Then there's cursed object, like in 'Bad Day at Black Rock', but we haven't been able to connect the vics yet," she added, shaking her head slightly.

"You're working this case...together?" Dean asked, looking from her to his brother.

"Yeah. I know, right?" Sam turned and grinned. "I mean, I guess all those Chuck Shurley books paid off."

Enough was enough. The insanity had to stop somewhere. Dean looked at Becky. "All right, listen, cookie, I don't know what kind of mojo you're working, but, believe me, I will find out."

Sam frowned at him. "Dean, that's...my wife you're talking to."

"You're not even acting like yourself, Sam!" Dean protested, knowing from the expression on Sam's face that it was a futile argument. Whatever the spell was, it had him all the way.

"How am I not?" Sam looked at him, his voice dropping as he crossed his arms defiantly over his chest.

"You married Becky Rosen!"

Becky looked at him, her mouth dropping open. "What are you saying? I'm a witch? Or maybe I'm a siren?" she asked him bitterly, taking a step closer to Sam. "Ever occur to you we're just – I don't know – happy?"

"Come on, Sam!" Dean turned back to Sam. "Guy wins the lotto, guy hits the bigs. All right, obviously, uh, people's dreams are coming true in this town. Don't you think this is a little bit of a coincidence?"

"You know what, Dean? What Becky and I have is real. And if you can't accept that, that's your problem, not ours," Sam said calmly, his eyes cold.

"Or maybe she's part of it. Because, for whatever reason, you're her dream," Dean said, trying to ignore the slight brain bulge of seeing them side by side. The top of her head didn't make it to his shoulder. "If you really do care about her, I'd be worried. Because people who do get their little fantasies or whatever seem to end up dead pretty quick."

Sam didn't seem to be hearing him.

"You know, I went after her, Dean. Maybe that's what's bugging you – that I'm moving on with my life. I mean, you took care of me, and that's great. But I don't need you anymore," his brother said, irrelevantly so far as Dean could see. "You lost Terry, Dean, and I'm sorry about that, but I'm not giving up on my chance of happiness to keep you company because you couldn't hold onto yours."

He hadn't expected that – at all. Becky's eyes had widened at Sam's words, he could see her curiosity practically jump out and the thought of her knowing, talking to Sam about it, made his stomach turn over.

"That's not what this is," he said, keeping his gaze on his brother. "And you know that."

"I told you, Dean," Sam said carefully. "And I don't care if you believe me or not, but I'm happy – right here, right now. That's not going to change."

"You even remember Lauren, Sam?" he asked. "Or did the spell she gave you wipe all that out too?"

He pulled out his phone, and played the first message. Sam's eyes narrowed at the sound of the nephilim's voice and he winced slightly, as if at a sudden headache.

_Dean, come on, please call me back. I'm worried about Sam. _

He looked at Becky. "That's who he's supposed to be with, not you. That's who he was in love with."

She kept her gaze on the floor and Sam rubbed unconsciously at his temple, as he glanced at her and back to the phone Dean held out.

"That was then, Dean," he said. "It all changed when I saw Becky again."

Dean shook his head and turned around. "Yeah, I bet."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Sam had always known where to hit to hurt the most. Maybe it was just the dynamic of siblings, he thought tiredly. He knew his brother's vulnerable places as well, but he couldn't bring himself to use that information, to create the kind of hurt that he'd spent most of his life trying to keep away from his little brother. Younger siblings didn't seem to have that same protective streak.

Cas said that Terry had asked to go home. He still couldn't quite make himself believe that. At the same time, he was telling himself that he was glad she'd gone. That she'd be safe in her magic-less world and Crowley would never find her there. It was harder to lie to himself than to anyone else.

He'd watched her take the dream root and slip into his brother's mind to keep Sam from imploding while he and Bobby had left to deal with Cas. He'd seen her go through every scrap of information she had about their world, about their lives, to try to give them an advantage. He'd felt the changes in his brother, had later found out that she'd somehow circumvented Sam falling into a pit of hallucinations by helping him talk out what he'd been through.

In the King of Hell's abandoned factory hideout, it'd taken pretty much every bit of self-control he'd had to not show how he'd felt when he'd seen her strung up from the ceiling like a side of beef, blood and bruising everywhere he'd looked. And he admitted to himself, when she'd tried to apologise for her mistake and had broken down in his arms, whatever hope he'd had of ignoring his feelings had died right there. He hadn't been sure that she wasn't in love with his brother. That'd been the only thing that had let him keep her at arm's length after that.

He looked around the cheap motel room, this one thankfully plain and neutral, and hauled in a deep breath, then another, forcing his memories and everything that came with them back down in the vault again.

Dumping his bags on the floor, he pulled out his phone and called Bobby. He needed some backup on this.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Three days later.**_

"My first demon case," Garth Fitzgerald III said proudly. "Man, I can't believe it!"

Dean looked at Sam. "Hopefully, your last." He looked back at the skinny man. "Well, buddy, I got to say, man – you, uh... you don't suck."

"Thank you. That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me," Garth said seriously. "Well..."

He stepped forward before Dean could move and wrapped his arms around him. Ignoring his brother's snort, Dean patted him awkwardly on the back, trying not to gag at the sickly-sweet aftershave the man used lavishly.

"Oh. Yeah. All right, that's – uh – yeah, thank you."

Letting go, Garth waved at them and about-faced to return to his car.

"Yeah, you, uh, take care," Dean said, sighing with relief as the car started up and reversed away. He looked at his brother. "Wow."

"Aww, you made a fwiend." Sam grinned at him and Dean rolled his eyes.

"Uh-uh," he told him warningly. The guy was okay. Weird. But okay. It hadn't mattered that much in the end. He'd asked Bobby for help because he'd wanted someone around to talk to and he hadn't been able to do it with Garth any more than he could've with the old hunter or his brother. He wasn't sure if that was a trust issue or if, down deep, he thought that talking about it would make everything feel worse.

"Look, man, uh... When I was all dosed up, I-I said some crap," Sam said, sobering as he turned to face him.

Another can of worms he didn't especially want to open. Forcing a smile, he said. "Oh, you mean, she – she wasn't your soulmate?"

"Shut up," Sam said with a grimace. "I mean, I do need you watching my back. Obviously."

"Yeah, when, uh, crazy groupies attack," Dean quipped, straight-faced.

"You know what I mean." He drew in a breath. "And I'm sorry what I said about Terry. You have to know I didn't mean that."

Looking away, Dean said, "Maybe you were right."

"No," Sam disagreed immediately, as if he'd expecting that response. "No, I really wasn't."

"You think Crowley's gunna ice that sonofabitch?" Dean asked him, leaning back against the trunk as he crossed his arms over his chest.

Sam recognised the diversion. "I hope so."

"You know, Lauren left about ten messages over the last week and a half –"

"What did you tell her?" Sam interrupted, his face suddenly paling.

"Didn't answer them," Dean said with a shrug.

"What?!"

Snorting, Dean said, "What was I supposed to tell her? You got married…to Becky?"

"Dude…crap…"

"And I'm thinking that you were right about a few things, Sammy," Dean continued, walking around the car. "It's stupid to think that you need me around all the time. You're a grown-up. You can deal with your own messes."

"Right," Sam said distractedly.

"You're a hike-in-the-desert, hippie-douche grown-up," Dean added, making a face at him.

"Dude, I was camping," Sam said, focussing on him again. "You camp," he pointed out.

"Yeah, whatever. Hippie."

He opened the driver's door as Sam opened the passenger door.

"You know what, though? Seriously?" Sam said to him over the roof of the Impala. "It might be nice."

"What?"

"I mean, you basically have been looking out for me your whole life," Sam explained, leaning on the car. "Now you finally get to take care of yourself. About time, huh?"

His brother's words bit down into a part of him he'd been trying not to look at. Six weeks ago, it would've been different. All of it different. He'd been trying to disentangle the threads of responsibility and memory and guilt, trying to figure who the hell he was under the layers of his father and his years of taking care of his brother, through the cracks of forty years in Hell and everything he hadn't faced up to in the last six years.

Six weeks ago, he'd wanted to free of the past. Now…that didn't matter.

"Yeah."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**AN:** I will uploading this story quite fast. Crossing Wires is underway but I hope you're enjoying this little 'companion piece' as well._


	3. Chapter 3 Disclosures

**Chapter 3 Disclosures**

* * *

In the warm comfort of Bobby's living room, Dean put the book he'd been reading down and rubbed his fingers over his eyes, reaching out with his other hand for the glass that sat on the table next to the chair.

A fluttering of wings in the room and the smell of feathers made him look up.

"Crowley has succeeded in opening Purgatory," Cas said tensely, walking across and looking from Dean to Sam. "He took the souls for Hell but he released the other beings."

"All the other beings?" Bobby asked, disbelief colouring his voice.

"No," Cas told him. "I believe the natives were not freed. But the Leviathan were."

The news brought Dean to his feet almost involuntarily. "Son-of-a-bitch, just what we needed!"

"Alright, don't panic," Bobby growled at him as he paced across the room. The hunter looked back to the angel. "How long ago?"

"Last night," Cas said. "The eclipse."

"Balls."

Sam looked at Lauren. "What do they want?"

"From Terry's notes, and the little information we've been able to find in Eleanor's books, they were the dominant life-form when God created them. I would guess that's still the plan," she said.

"Refresh my memory on what Terry had," Bobby asked her.

Dean stopped as Lauren hesitated, turning around and catching the doubtful look on her face. He scowled as he looked at the floor, realising that none of them had talked about Terry since he'd gotten back, not while he was around. He'd thought it was because they'd moved on but he could see now that they probably were still discussing her, just doing it when he wasn't there.

"I'm not going to break," he said shortly to her.

Looking guiltily down at the notes, Lauren said, "Uh, well, they were supposed to come out with Castiel." She glanced up at the angel who shifted his feet uncomfortably on the floor. "Then they left him. Those are just notes from the writer's conference a couple of months before that year ended. In the books Eleanor kept, and in your books," she added, looking at Bobby. "There's more about the mythology about the first beasts, both Leviathan and Behemoth. But they're all describing what they did when they were created, before humanity was even formed so what they'll do in this time, with the world as it is now, that's the question."

"Anything on how we kill them?" Dean asked.

"Well, that's the problem. According to the mythology, there's nothing that can kill them," she told him reluctantly. "That's why God locked them away to begin with."

"Awesome," he said, throwing himself back into the armchair and staring at the angel. "Just fucking awesome."

"Cas," Sam said, throwing a nervous look at his brother but forcing himself to ask anyway. "Is there any way we could get a ride back to Terry's world and –"

"No!" Dean sat up abruptly. "No, we'll figure it out. She's safe there. She doesn't need us fucking that over as well."

"But she could have more information –"

Dean glared at him and Cas injected, "I can't, Sam. The dimensions were close then. The nearest acceptable conjunction between her world and ours wouldn't be for months now."

"And I said, no," Dean snapped. "She made her choice. We're not changing that."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"They're just humans," Chet said, looking at his fingernails.

"No, they're not just anything," the leader said, speaking through the mouth of one of the country's wealthiest entrepreneurs. "Were you not paying attention when we brain-reamed that demon?"

Chet shut up. Bibbing was one of Dick's favourite methods of punishment and he was just getting used to this body.

"They've taken down angels and demons and Crowley thought that God was lending a hand every now and then as well," Dick continued, looking at himself in the gilt-edged mirror and straightening his tie. "They have to go. Start with the VRS and the usual avenues. Once they're gone, we'll be on track to get this party going without any interference."

"Yes, boss," Chet said, getting to his feet and looking across at his partner. Edgar shrugged and rose from the sofa, grabbing his jacket and pulling it on.

"Start with the old man's place," Roman added, turning to look at them. "Crowley seemed to think that was their base of operations."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Sam looked out through the filmy sheer curtains at the kitchen window at the silent rows of junked cars.

"You sure? I don't see anything," he said to his brother. Dean was at the dining room window, eye to the crack in the heavy material over, looking obliquely across the yard.

"I'm sure," he said tightly. "You got the remote for the front fence?"

Sam nodded as Bobby and Lauren came into the dining room.

"Saw one guy from the bedroom," Bobby said to no one in particular. "Lauren saw another on the other side, down by the fields."

"Why us?" Sam asked, looking back out into the yard, his thumb rubbing lightly over the trigger button.

"No clue."

"How do they even know about us?"

"Crowley let them out," Lauren said quietly behind Sam. "Maybe they talked to him on the way through?"

"Lying sack of –" Dean cut himself off as he saw the furtive movement between the fence and the cars. "Sam, light it up!"

There were fourteen buried mines between the rickety steel fence and the first line of junkers closest to it. Bobby'd insisted on them getting a couple of crates from their father's lockup in New York after Crowley's invasion. The line of six, on the left-hand side of the auto yard's rusted iron gates went up with a thunderous roar, earth and corrugated steel sheet and razor wire and bits of rusted cars flying in every direction and a monster cloud of black smoke and dust rising in a mushroom-shape above the yard. Dean swung around and raced for the side of the house, hitting the back door then the porch steps in two strides and spotting the intruder that Lauren had seen halfway up the narrow alleyway between the piles of cars.

His automatic was in his hand and he skidded to a halt, pumping all thirteen shots, at a range of no more than fifteen yards, into the man standing there. The bullet holes riddled chest and shoulders, neck and face in neat, tight groupings and the man jittered and jigged on the spot, finally falling backwards with a thump on the damp dirt when the gun fell silent.

Dean moved toward him cautiously, and stopped as the dude got back to his feet, watching with a sour kind of incredulity as the black and bloodied holes in the guy's skin closed up one by one, pushing the bullets out first, leaving a pile of squashed slugs around his feet.

"Nice shooting," the man said, one brow lifted. He was in his mid-forties, Dean thought, pocked tan skin and black hair and dark eyes showing a Latino descent.

"You should've called for an appointment."

"We thought that dropping in would be more spontaneous," the man said, smiling at him. "I like your set up."

"What the fuck do you want?"

"Everything."

"Naturally," Dean muttered to himself as he took a step back, putting the gun back in his coat. His hand closed around the rough hilt of the machete, strapped to his thigh in a leather sheath. It hissed slightly as he drew it out.

"You can't kill us," the man said cheerfully, walking toward him. "But we can kill you – eat you all up!"

"We'll see about that," Dean said. He took a step toward the guy and swung the blade, dropping and launching forward as the guy ducked and evaded. There was a thud as the head hit the nearest junker and he looked down at the headless body, face screwed up in disgust as he watched a stream of black ooze spill from the neck and spread across the dirt.

"That's…just gross."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Got a body," he called out when he saw Sam and Bobby dragging plastic bags around from the front fence. "And a head."

"Hard to say what we got," Bobby said, lifting his head to look at the younger hunter. "Pieces everywhere."

"Well, I guess we can kill them –"

On the porch, Lauren's eyes widened. "Dean! Watch out!"

He ducked to one side, hitting the ground and rolling hard, feeling something heavy and unyielding bounce off his leg and something in the leg flex sickeningly with the impact.

The guy he'd killed lifted the iron piping he was carrying for another hit, taking a step closer and gunfire filled the air, the sharp yaps of his brother's auto, and the deeper booms of Bobby's pump-action shotgun. The guy stopped, the bullets and pellets driving into his body absorbed and spat out almost as fast.

It was just a delay, Dean thought, rolling to his feet and grunting as his leg gave way under him. He hobbled-ran to the shed, wondering distractedly how the hell he was gunna change gear with his left leg apparently unwilling to take any weight, and then he was at the driver's door, throwing it open and sliding inside.

The Impala started immediately and his leg delivered a bolt of pain that went right up his backbone into his skull when he shoved his foot down on the clutch. Shaking and swearing and sweating, Dean used his right foot awkwardly to get the car into reverse and backed out of the shed, increasing speed as he aimed the car for the man still standing in front of the house.

He didn't hear Bobby scream as he thumped into the body with the trunk of the car, just caught a glimpse of Lauren's horror struck face when he hit the brake.

"Hurry up!" he yelled through the window.

Sam and Lauren prised the dismembered hand that had crawled out of one of the plastic bags at their feet and fastened onto the old man's shoulder, both of their faces showing revulsion under their thin-lipped determination to get it off.

Bobby staggered down the steps between them when it finally plopped off and landed in the dirt of the yard and they piled into the car, Dean hitting the clutch, accelerator and brake in quick succession (_but nowhere near as fast as he would've if his leg had been okay_) and three-point-turning the hell out of the dooryard and through the gates.

"Where to?"

"Sheriff," Bobby said, his face a shade between milk and ash. "Jody's house. Goddamned monster broke ma collarbone."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Two weeks later.**_

Dean drummed his fingers against the car's wheel, his attention on the road as they sped through open farmland in the early morning light. "Jersey Devil? Really?"

"Campers getting munched on," Sam pointed out. "I know Dad didn't think much of it –"

"Or Jim, or Caleb," Dean interjected. His leg, just a fracture the doc'd said, was itching like a bitch under the semi-pliable cast. "Or Bobby, or Rufus."

"But there's a lot of missing people who went camping in those woods and never came back," Sam continued determinedly. "And Jersey isn't exactly the predator capital of the country."

He couldn't argue with that. Three bodies in the last three weeks. Something had moved into the big stretch of woods.

Bobby was staying with Jody Mills and Lauren had gone to see a professor in Dallas, someone who specialised in biblical myth, apparently, looking for something that would help with the fact that not only were an unspecified number of Purgatory's Most Wanted out and about, but they'd somehow known about them, known Bobby's address and had been more than usually determined to get rid of them.

All that would've been fine, would've been peachy even, if behind every one of his brother's occasional deep sighs and pointed looks, there wasn't the idea in Sam's head that Terry would know more about this than they could find out any other way.

Even Cas' careful explanation of the multi-dimensional and cyclical nature of the universe hadn't stopped Sam from mentioning that option again.

It was all making it hard to think about what he was supposed to do. Keep the world safe. Keep his brother safe. Give up on what he wanted to save everyone. He thought of Melanie and looked down at the curved line at the base of his index finger. If he did find a way to get rid of it, would that help?

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The restaurant was crowded and Dean ordered the special of the day, a turducken sandwich of gargantuan proportions.

"What've we got?" he asked his brother through a mouthful of food.

"Well, according to Ranger Rick," Sam said, his gaze following the ranger out of the restaurant. "Bear attack."

"Unlikely."

"Yeah," Sam agreed straight away. "The wounds on the last camper they found weren't bear claw. And every internal organ had been eaten. Leaves us with werewolf, except the timing's wrong. Or wendigo, but we're too far south."

"Or the new game in town."

"Why leave the bodies?" Sam shook his head. "Maybe it is the Jersey Devil."

"Ranger Rick seemed not that concerned about his partner," Dean pointed out, his eyes closed as he chewed. "Bad blood and a little Deliverance on the side?"

"I don't think so," Sam said, picking at his salad with his fork and looking around the restaurant. Aside from their waiter, who'd had an attitude from the moment they'd walked in, everyone in the place seemed…not calm, he decided with a frown. Disassociated was closer to what he was seeing. "Dean, look at these people."

Opening his eyes, Dean looked around the room. There was virtually no conversation going on anywhere, everyone was eating and sitting quietly. Most were sampling the special.

"Guess the sandwich has that effect on people," he remarked, looking back at his own and taking another bite.

"You remember anything that Bobby taught us when we kids about hunting in the woods?" Sam asked him.

"All of it," Dean told him.

"Good, we're going out for a look tonight."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Sam," Dean said, lifting the beam of his flashlight to illuminate the body hanging from the tree. "You ever see a bear carry a kill into a tree like that?"

"Cats do it, leopards and jaguar," Sam said, peering up at the gory remains. "Not that they're likely here."

"Call it in?"

"Yeah," Sam agreed, pulling out his phone as Dean started to look at the ground for tracks and trace.

"He'll be here in half an hour," Sam said a minute later.

"Lot of churned up crap here, but no tracks," Dean commented, crouching down and playing the light over the ground. He looked back up to the body. "Takes a lot of muscle to do that."

"Is it tied?"

Dean shook his head. "Hung on the branch."

"You want to get him down or me?" Sam asked, holding out his hand, fist over palm. Dean looked around and let out an exasperated breath. He stood, curling his fist over his palm in mimicry of his brother. They looked at each other and counted.

"Ha!" Dean said, for once throwing paper instead of scissors and Sam shook his head as he tucked his gun back into his coat pocket and handed Dean his rifle.

"I'm crippled anyway," Dean reminded his brother, watching his ascent.

Climbing into the tree, Sam stopped at the branch that Ranger Phil was hanging from, looking at the deep claw marks that scarred the wood. He was leaning forward to unhook the ranger's coat from the protruding branch when under there was an ominous crack and the branch gave under the combined weight of hunter and ranger.

"Sam! You alright?"

Sam grunted and rolled over, trying to get his lungs moving enough to get some air into them. "Mhmm."

Headlights splashed the trees around them and Dean dragged his brother out of the way of the four-wheel drive that bumped its way toward them.

"What'd you find?" Ranger Rick called as he turned off the engine and got out of the car.

"Your partner," Dean said, gesturing to the torn-up body clearly visible in the headlights.

"Whoa, golly, I think that's Phil," the ranger said as he walked closer to the body. "Guess we found Phil."

"Isn't that what I just said?" Dean muttered to his brother irritably. "He stoned or drunk?"

Sam shook his head, his hand closing around Dean's arm. "Listen."

Dean heard the rustle a second later, and the barrel of his rifle came up. "Hey, Rick, get back here."

"What? I got to-uh…I got to identity the body, for sure," Rick said, leaning clumsily over the remains.

"Back here, NOW!" Dean shouted, firing as he caught movement in the corner of his eye.

In front of the car, there was a flash and then the ranger was gone. Sam bolted and Dean ran-hobbled after the crashing noises they could hear in the undergrowth, flashlight beams swinging wildly from side to side as they followed the trail.

In a clearing several hundred yards from the distant glow of the car, the noises stopped and they skidded to a halt, looking around warily.

Dean tapped his ear. Somewhere nearby there were new sounds, mushy crunching and some kind of liquid gurgle. In the glow of the flashlight, Dean saw his brother's face scrunch up as he put an image to the noises.

"It's eating Rick?" Sam asked in a whisper.

"Damn, I liked Rick," Dean murmured, turning off his flashlight and closing his eyes. The barrel of his gun swung around and up, moving slowly as it tracked the sound through the canopy to one side of the clearing. He fired and there was a heavy thud as something hit the ground in the bushes.

"Good shot," Sam said admiringly, turning his light on and picking out a figure lying on the forest floor.

"Told you all that crap that Bobby showed us stuck," Dean said, following his brother. "Not much to look at."

"We need to take a look in better light," Sam told him. "We'll take him back to the cabin."

"I'm starving, this gonna take long?"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Gerard Browder," Dean said, peering myopically at the wallet he held. His stomach was rumbling and moaning and he was craving the taste of the three-bird sandwich, saliva glands filling his mouth as he thought about it. "Two hundred and thirty eight pounds, five-nine, blue eyes, brown hair…"

Sam looked down at the body lying on the table in front of him. "Lost a bit of weight."

He poked a pencil into the bullet hole in Gerard's chest, stepping back with a look of distaste when a thin stream of grey goo ran out of it. "What is that?"

Dean walked around the table and looked at it. "Open him up and have a look?"

"Yeah," Sam agreed unwillingly. He turned to the duffle and pulled out a machete, making the first cut through the rib cage. "God."

Inside of Gerard's abdomen, every organ was flooded with the grey goo. "What is this?"

"Can we break for dinner?" Dean asked restlessly.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Two hours later, Sam stared at the sandwich sitting on the table where the late Gerard Browder had been lying and then back at his brother. Dean was sitting on the kitchen counter by the window, gazing dreamily around the room.

"Dean, you okay?"

"Never better, man," Dean confirmed, one side of his mouth lifting in a loose half-smile. "I feel…feel…great. Great."

"Right," Sam muttered. His brother was stoned, presumably by the same grey goo that had filled Gerard Browder and had turned the camper into some kind of super-monster, and was no doubt turning the townspeople who were eating at Biggerson's into morons or psychopaths or both right now.

"You know," Dean continued, his voice deep and soft. "I didn't even tell her, before she went. Didn't tell her anything."

Sam looked at him, his attention sharpening. "Terry?"

"Mmm-hmm," Dean said, leaning back against the window frame. "Thought I'd have time. Thought I'd have time for a lot of things. Thought I'd be able to tell her about Hell, you know…"

He trailed off into silence and Sam cleared his throat. "What about Hell, Dean?"

"All those missing pieces. The pieces I can't find anymore," Dean said, his eyes half-closing as he appeared to think about that. "You and Lauren, man, that's great. Great."

"Yeah, it is," Sam said, recoiling as Dean's sandwich heaved and a glob of goo smacked onto the table. "Dean? You sure you feel okay?"

"Feeling…overrated, man," Dean said. "Every time I let my guard down, whammo! Right in the kisser."

"You can't give up." Sam took a step away from the table, closer to his brother. "You'll find someone else."

"Nope, no one else. No one else knows. What she did. Does. Whatever," Dean said. "S'okay. I don't care. I feel fine."

"We got to find out what these people are putting in the lunch special, Dean," Sam said, looking back at the sandwich. It gave another burp of goop and he felt his stomach turn over slowly. That stuff was in his brother.

Looking back at Dean, he asked, "Can you walk?"

"Walk? Yeah, maybe," Dean said, wriggling forward on the counter and half-falling onto his feet. "Sure, I can walk. Can't sing. Can't keep anyone. I can walk. Walk good."

"Good," Sam told him soothingly, grabbing his shoulder and keeping him upright as they went into the hall. "That's good."

"I can drive good."

"Not today."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Not them, it's me," Dean groaned from the backseat and Sam frowned, twisting around to look at his brother who was sprawled there.

"Everybody leaves."

The memory came back hard, and Sam swore under his breath as he remembered the angel's illusion of their mother and what she'd said to his brother. He'd thought Dean'd realised that had been the angel trying to break him. Had thought he'd let it go. Apparently he hadn't.

"Dean?"

"Dammit, Sammy," Dean replied, rolling onto his side. "God damn it all to hell."

"Dean? You awake?"

"No."

"That wasn't real," Sam tried again. "It was just Zachariah fucking with you."

"I know," Dean muttered. "I know that, Sammy, but they still go. Still go."

He didn't know what to say to that. Ahead, through the trees, he could see the loading dock of the Biggerson's restaurant and he slowed down, turning off the headlights as he coasted down the slight hill and stopped before the trees ended.

The binoculars brought the back of the building into focus and he watched a truck pull in. The driver got out and unloaded several dozen cartons from it, wheeling them into the store-rooms.

"Guess we follow him," Sam said softly as the truck driver came out and got back in the truck.

A snore from the back seat was the only response.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Dean woke slowly, his head throbbing and his mouth tasting like he'd spent the night eating from a trash can. He looked around and sat up gingerly.

"Where're we?"

"Midwest Meat and Poultry Distribution warehouse," Sam told him quietly from the front seat. "They deliver to Biggerson's."

"I feel like three kinds of crap," Dean grumbled.

"That, uh, sandwich had some bad side-effects."

"Yeah." He leaned back against the seat, disconnected memories filling his mind. "Did we find the ranger?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "Looks like one of the missing campers went Pumpkinhead and killed the others, including Rick Evans and his partner, Phil."

"Huh."

"His internal organs were swimming in a substance that also came out of your sandwich," Sam continued, glancing at him in the rear view mirror.

"Ergh." Dean rubbed a hand over his face. He remembered talking to Sam. A lot. About things he hadn't wanted to talk about. "Any other side-effects?"

"Not really," Sam said, focussing the glasses on the door. "Oh…no."

"What?" Dean leaned forward, wincing as the sudden movement set off another firecracker in his head.

"The leviathan are here."

"Wow, that's…that's just awesome," Dean said. "Unkillable monsters poisoning the population. That'll be easy."

Sam shook his head. "We have to find out what they're doing."

"How the hell we gunna do that?"

"Stealthily," Sam said, putting the glasses down and opening his door. "Come on."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Two days later.**_

Bobby winced as he turned around too fast, his shoulder aching. "They were what?"

"They're supplying those restaurants with some kind of poison…or additive…or something that's turning most of the customers into barely-functioning lumps, and some into raving psychopaths," Sam said again.

"And it's being run by some hot-shot business guy," Dean added, knocking the top of the beer he held and passing it to his brother.

"Dick Roman," Sam supplied the name as he took the beer. "That's more than just hot-shot, that's global empire."

"What'd Crowley say?"

"Said the leviathans were dicks and he'd give us a clear playing field until we ganked them," Dean told him sourly. "Not a real big help."

"Lauren called yesterday," Bobby told them. "Said she found out a few things but nothing that'll help us kill 'em or neutralise 'em."

"Well," Jody said from the doorway, plates in either hand. "You boys are welcome to stick around here for as long as you want to."

"Thanks, Jody," Sam said, taking his food from her.

"Yeah, thanks," Dean added, picking up the burger the plate she passed him held.

"You know," Jody said, seating down beside Bobby and picking up her fork. "Everything on this world has an opposite, some opposing force."

There was a moment's silence around the table, then Bobby scratched his beard. "Yeah, okay, that's true."

"So there must be something that does stop these things, right?" she asked him as she speared her salad. "All you need to do is figure it out."

Dean lifted a brow. "Well, we're working on it."

"No," she said. "I mean, maybe you guys are looking in the wrong place. You said that the angel said that the Leviathan were older than them?"

Bobby nodded cautiously. "Yeah, so?"

"But Lauren said that what was in Purgatory first was what she called the 'Old Ones', the ones that were there even before the Leviathan. So maybe you need to look for one of them."

"In Purgatory?" Dean asked. "We can't open it again –"

"And I don't want to," Sam added, memories of his time there crowding up against him.

"It's somethin', though," Bobby said thoughtfully. "I'll get onto Lauren again after we eat."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Dean, a word?" Sam said when the plates had been cleared away and Bobby and Jody had returned to the living room. "On the porch?"

Dean followed his brother out. He had a good idea of what Sam wanted to talk about and he tried to think of diversionary subjects that would derail his brother's determination.

"Even Bobby admits we should at least be thinking about going to see Terry, if Cas can get us there," Sam said when they hit the cold night air.

Dean watched his breath fog up as it left his lungs in a long, noisy exhale. "That's months away. We'll figure something out before then."

"If we don't…?"

"If we don't…and if Cas can swing it…and if it doesn't let anything else follow us across…then," Dean paused, swallowing a mouthful of icy beer from the bottle he held. "Then, yeah, maybe."

"You don't have to go." Sam looked at him, twisting around to lean on the porch railing.

Dean looked at him flatly. "No one else is going."

"Maybe it's not such a good idea –"

"It's a crap idea," Dean cut him off. "But you might be right. And Bobby. We're not going to find the tablets, not any time soon. Even if we did, we still need a prophet. So, if we can't find any other way, I'll talk to Cas."

He felt his stomach ice over and curl up at the thought, at the same time a flush of heat ran right down through his nervous system. He wanted to ask why. It was a dumb question, because who doesn't save their skin when presented with a choice like that? What sane person would stick around in a world like this when they could live a normal life in their own? Still, he wanted to see her face and ask.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**AN:** I feel I should point out that there's only enough of the Season 7 episodes for Dean to think about what's going on, and to provide the ongoing background information for the story. For those who liked the re-imagined episodes of Crossing Over with Terry's inclusion, sorry, that ain't happening here, since Terry's not here, and I can't see the point of putting in the details of the episodes where I'm not changing them, since we've all seen them! I hope it's not too disorienting and confusing though!_


	4. Chapter 4 Whatever It Takes

**Chapter 4 Whatever It Takes**

* * *

_**Four weeks later.**_

Sam snuck another look at the woman sitting beside him in the car. As usual, she looked incredible. He was aware that his hair was in the same lopsided mess it'd been when he'd gotten out of bed that morning and he was still repressing yawns from searching for answers most of the night.

"Did he say anything about the way he was dealing with his feelings?" she asked him, and he looked back at the road, huffing out an impatient breath at the question. Dean didn't deal and he'd ranted on that subject often enough for Lauren to know it.

"Not really," he said. "He said he hadn't told her anything."

Lauren nodded. "He's drinking more, isn't he?"

It was hard to quantify his brother's drinking, Sam thought morosely. He could function well even with enough whiskey in him to floor another man. Years of practice had given his brother a tolerance level that was close to supernatural.

"Yeah, I think so."

"When your father died," Lauren said slowly. "How long did it take him to get past that?"

"He's still not past that," Sam told her, his forehead crinkling up. "He sort of is, but every now and then something happens and it hits him all over again." Like a sledgehammer out of the blue, he realised, remembering Dean's reaction over Adam, his comments when they'd gone to Heaven…not for the first time, he wondered uneasily how much his brother could lock away before it all came crashing out. "He knew what happened. He hated that Dad had done that to save him."

The noisy hiss of the tyres over the wet road filled the car for a few minutes, then Lauren turned to look at him again. "What do you think? Do you think he really fell?"

"I don't know," Sam admitted. He didn't. He should've because Dean was his brother and he thought he knew him better than anyone else in the world, but he didn't. "I think he found someone he could trust."

Which, he considered, was the most important thing for his brother. If he trusted someone, he would give them all of himself, no holds barred. The deeper knowledge that between them, he'd broken Dean's trust in him stabbed a second later. He thought that he could rebuild that trust, but it was a work of years, not weeks or months and he knew his brother was still wary of letting him see what he kept locked away, even now. The long talk on the way to Vegas had rebuilt some things. It was a start.

He glanced back at Lauren. "He said there was no one else who knew about him."

She nodded. "She saw most of the last six years of your lives. She saw things that he kept hidden from everyone else. Things he couldn't explain to anyone else. I can see how that alone would have made a difference."

The signs for Sioux Falls appeared at the side of the road and Sam slowed a little, concentrating again on driving. Bobby had gotten a call from a hunter needing help with a pack of skinwalkers, somewhere south-west, Jody had told them on the last call. They'd have a few days to get started on the boxes of books the trunk of the car held.

Pulling into the sheriff's neatly paved driveway, he frowned as he realised Dean's car was gone.

Jody came out onto the porch a moment later, looking at them worriedly as they unpacked the boxes. "Did Dean call you?"

"About what?" Sam asked her uncertainly. He hadn't had a call from him in two days.

"Uh, well, something came up and he said he'd call you, wait for back up, but he's down in Canton, looking at a case I found," Jody said.

"A case?" Sam looked at Lauren. "What kind of a case?"

"It's easier to show you," Jody told him, taking a box and carrying it inside.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Lauren turned the screen around. "Here, Canton, Ohio – 1944, 1957, 1960, 1974. Three people, each time. All the bodies were found in a state of extreme desiccation. The timing's off – there's no pattern to these dates."

Sam leaned close to the screen. "Bring up the photos."

As each of the grainy prints appeared on the screen, Sam copied them to the drive and opened his photo-enhancing software, starting with the earliest. Lauren shifted her chair back as he pulled another up to the laptop.

"Jody, can you get access to the police and security feeds in Canton?" Sam asked the sheriff.

She nodded, turning for her keys and coat. "What am I looking for?"

Sam opened three photos on the screen. All three showed a man in a fedora, rakishly tipped to one side, and overcoat, watching the crime scenes or walking from them. "This guy, I think."

"Two victims in the last week, Sam," Lauren pointed out. "We need to go."

"I'll be an hour," Jody said from the doorway. "I'm coming too."

"We'll pick you up at the station," Sam said, and sent the cleaned-up photographs to the printer. He picked up his phone and tried Dean again.

"Still no answer?"

"And no GPS location, no ping, no nothing," Sam said, getting up from the chair. "Goddamn him and not waiting."

"Sam, he's not usually this reckless, is he?"

Sam thought back. He'd seen Dean storm into jobs without backup or forethought twice. When he'd realised the truth about their father. And when he'd known he was going to Hell.

"No, not usually."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Canton, Ohio, November 1944**_

Dean stared around at the police station interrogation room, worried about the situation he was in, but kind of tickled about it as well. It looked like a set on an old movie, the uniformed cops in old-fashioned button-to-the-neck serge or wool suits, the captain straight-laced and Army-ramrod-stiff, his tie knotted immaculately at the collar of his crisp white shirt, despite the lateness of the hour.

Forced into the chair at the table, the barrel-lock cuffs clanking around his wrists, he noticed that the long table that the captain faced him across was actually wood. Real wood. No Formica or scratches. No peeling edges or cigarette burns or ink stains.

"Okay, can I just –" he started to say, looking back at the cop.

"Don't." The man stared at him warningly. "Listen to me, you tell me you're from the Bureau one more time, I'm gonna air you out myself. Got it?"

On the table between them, the contents of Dean's pockets had been emptied out and the captain picked up the mobile phone, flinching backwards a bit as the screen lit up under the touch of his thumb.

"'No signal'," he murmured, squinting suspiciously at the device in his hand. "Are you some kind of Jerry spy?"

Dean looked from his phone to the cop's face. "Jerry who?"

"And a terrible one at that," the cop said with a disdainful sniff as he put the phone down and picked up the slim ID wallet. "This badge was issued sixty-eight years from now. Ace work, kraut-muncher."

"'44?" Dean asked disbelievingly. "I'm stuck in 1944?!"

The cop's eyes narrowed. "We're all stuck in 1944, ya bunny."

At the top of the short flight of stairs that led down into the room, the door opened. Dean looked around then back at the cop as the man got to his feet, dropping the billfold onto the table.

"Take a powder." The low, harsh voice sounded like every hard-boiled detective in every film noir movie he'd ever stayed up to watch. Bogie, Robinson, Mitchum, Tierney and Ford leapt into his mind as he watched the man, dressed in a pin-striped suit and a camel-hair overcoat, walk slowly past the retreating captain down the stairs.

"Look I don't even like friggin' sauerkraut, okay, so you can just skip the –" Dean shifted in his chair, his cuffs clinking against each other.

"What happened in the alley?" the man said coldly, leaning on the table, his face shadowed under the brim of the soft brown hat he wore. "And paint me a real picture."

Dean leaned on the table, trying to work out if the truth or a lie would get him out of here more quickly. The only trouble was there wasn't an easy lie that covered the items on the table, or the .45 Colt automatic the cops had somewhere in the station either. The gun had seen service through WWII but the bullets in the magazine were a different matter.

"I was chasing this dude. Uh, I'd just seen him mummify a guy," he said, shrugging. "Yeah. I jumped him in an alley – he lights up red. Poof, we're in 1944."

The man took off his hat, tossing it onto the table along with a thick file with a government seal on the front. In the pitiless glare of the caged light above the table, Dean realised he was older than he'd seemed. Thick, dark hair was combed smoothly back from a low forehead and dark brows shadowed dark eyes. "Tell me more about the red light."

"The red light?" Dean frowned at him. "Are you seriously asking –"

"You want out of this jail? You're gonna tell me everything you can about that man and that so-called light," the man said evenly, leaning back and staring at him expressionlessly.

"Okay," Dean said. "It was red. I saw it. And then me and the dude? We were here."

"Would you say that, uh... it was all around you or that more that it came from inside this fellow?"

The question was out of place, Dean thought, looking carefully at the man. Out of place for someone who didn't have personal experience of that sort of thing, anyway. He'd recognised the man's smooth economy of movement when he'd entered the room, an almost-indefinable awareness of surroundings that he associated with just one type of person.

"You believe me," Dean said flatly. "Who the hell are you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," the man said, glancing at the ceiling.

"I know hunters when I meet them," Dean told him shortly. "Something about the belief level. Demons, ghosts, shifters. Hey, I've killed 'em all. And you're the same. Just sixty-eight years before me, huh?"

"A hunter?" the man said, tilting his head to one side in consideration. "Of demons and ghosts, no less."

"And things that fill up with red light and zap people through time, yeah," Dean said sourly.

The man leaned forward, holding out his hand. "And your name is...?"

"Dean," he said, taking the other man's hand and shaking it. "Winchester."

The man nodded as he released the grip. "I'm Ness. Eliot Ness."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Canton, Ohio, Now**_

Sam watched the software running its passes back and forth across the clearest image he had, slowly but surely matching pixels and producing a more and more detailed resolution. It was a time-consuming process, but it would be worth it if he could find just one detail that would nail this sucker and let them identify him. They had a name, Snider. They even had an address. But neither helped working out what he was.

Lauren walked up behind him, resting her hands lightly on his shoulders. "How's it going?"

"Painfully slow," he told her, tilting his head back to look into her face upside-down. "Where's Jody?"

"Catching up on lost sleep," she said. "We should try that too."

"Yeah," he agreed absently, looking back at the screen. The passes had reached the guy's hands and he leaned forward suddenly, staring at the ring on the man's right hand. "I've seen that before."

"It's the sign of Infinity," Lauren said, leaning over his shoulder. "Represents Time."

"Time," Sam muttered, turning to the pile of books next to him. Most of them were journals, Bobby's and Rufus'. He skimmed the pages of the first two and then stopped when he reached the third. "Rufus had a picture of that symbol in this journal," he told Lauren, flipping it open and skipping through the pages. "I can't remember what it had to do with –"

"There!" Lauren pointed at the symbol just as Sam registered it. "The sigil of the God of Time?"

"A god, well, that's fantastic," Sam groaned, reading through the hunter's notes. "Just what we need is another damned god!"

Leaning on his shoulder, Lauren read down the notes. "Chronos," she said. "It's a start, we know what we're looking for now."

"That guy saw his neighbour sucked dry in front of him, saw the flash of red light and Dean disappearing along with the light and the guy and everything," Sam said, his voice shaking a little. "If this is Chronos, where'd they go?"

"We'll worry about that in the morning," she said soothingly. "Let's work out how to summon him and how to kill him first, okay?"

"Sure! Why not!?" Sam sputtered through a snort of laughter. "Lauren –"

"Come on, a couple of hours of sleep, Sam."

He wanted to protest, wanted to start hitting the books and the search engines but his sight was beginning to blur and he knew he wasn't thinking straight. For all his great speeches about his brother living his own life, the thought of Dean being lost, somewhere…some _when_…without him, on his own, sent shivers up and down his spine.

As if she'd read his mind, Lauren leaned closer, holding him. "We'll find him, but we have to be right at the top of our game for this."

"Right."

"Come to bed." She stood up, holding out her hand. "Just for a little while."

He nodded wearily, getting to his feet. "Just for a little while," he agreed.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Canton, Ohio, November 1944**_

Rubbing his wrists as he followed Ness out of the police station and down the street, Dean looked around with a new appreciation of what he was seeing. When he'd come out of the alley, he'd only had a blurred impression of old cars, old…everything…then he'd been bundled into the car and driven away. Now, even by the yellow-toned street-lights, he could see that if this wasn't 1944, it was a damned good period movie set.

Men and women walked along the street, arm in arm, broad-shouldered suits and coats brushing against each other, the colours mostly drab and unexciting but it was a post-war world and manufacturing had been geared to the effort for years. Every man he saw looked smartly-dressed, he realised…good suits, hats, gloves, tailored coats and every woman was shapely and dazzling in their low heels, stockings and simple, stark make-up. So far as he knew it was just an ordinary weeknight, but no entire neighbourhood back home would be got up like this, even on a special occasion. A fleeting image crossed his mind and he winced a bit, not wanting to think how she'd look in these clothes, in this time. He had a sinking feeling she'd have loved it.

"Where are we going?" he asked Ness, lengthening his stride to walk next to him.

"Tailor," Ness said shortly. "You work with me, you have some respect. You look like some kind of brindlestiff."

_Brindlestiff? _

Dean let the word roll around in his mind, hunting for some association that might give him a clue. He looked down at the oil-stained, somewhat torn and still perfectly serviceable jeans, shirt and jacket he wore, and the association that came to him was that he'd just been insulted.

"What we gotta do is nail this guy before he gets vic number three and takes off again," he argued, slowing down stubbornly.

Ness turned around and looked at him. "We won't do that if you're standing out like a sore thumb. Nothing fancy, but you need to blend in here."

It made a certain amount of logical sense, Dean allowed to himself, speeding up as the Treasury agent swung around and strode away. From the looks of the people they passed, he wasn't exactly blending in right now.

The store was a narrow front in a soot-stained building two roads back from the main street and Ness knocked sharply on the door three times. After a minute, a tall, auburn-haired woman opened the door a crack, peering up at them.

"What's the rumpus, Eliot?"

"Ezra Moore, Dean Winchester," Ness said, putting his hand on the front of the door and pushing it open. "He's from the future."

"Paint me impressed, sugar," Ezra said, waving her hand in an invitation to enter. Her dress was in a soft fabric that was stiffened in the bodice and swirled from the hips, a rich shade of chocolate with no buttons or bows or frills, dressed up by the detailed work of the neck. A blue pin cushion encircled one wrist, a fine, gold ladies watch the other. "Not much of a sense of style in the future, is there? Or is that just you?"

Dean walked past her, looking around the crowded store. Bolts of cloth lined one wall, mirrors and dressing rooms took up the back and dozens of suits, dresses and coats hung in ordered rows across the other wall. Ezra closed the door behind them, turning to the store window and dropping a blackout curtain over it.

"Stand still and let me get your measurements," she instructed him as she walked back. She pulled out a soft measuring tape and moved around him. He felt the brief touch on his shoulders, around his arm, and her cool fingers lifting aside his collars as the tape slid around his neck. "I've got a couple of things that will do." She headed for the racks. "Won't take a minute to do the adjustments. Picked up a nice load of worsted the other day, hangs beautifully, a very subtle check in the weave and I think it'll bring out the colour of those pretty green peepers."

Dean looked at Ness in confusion. "What'd she say?"

"Relax," Eliot told him dryly. "She'll have you fixed up so's your own mother won't recognise you."

There was a rattle of coat-hangers and then she was back, pants, shirt, jacket and waistcoat over one arm which she thrust toward him. "Dressing room. Get dressed, come out, I'll fix the fit."

He turned and glanced around, seeing a green velvet curtain behind him. At Ezra's shooing gestures he backed toward it, then turned and entered the cubicle, pulling the curtain shut tight behind him.

On the other side of it, he heard the low murmur of their voices as he pulled off his clothes hurriedly and started to change.

"…like a raw rook to me, Eliot."

"He's one of us, I want you to get Valencia to check out the name…Winchester…" Ness' voice dropped too low for Dean to hear.

The pants fit exactly around the waist and he looked down in surprise. They were a little too short but there was a generous hem to work with. The shirt, crisply white and starched fit as well, the long pointed collars hanging exactly to either side of the buttons. Same number of layers, he thought bemusedly, doing up the waistcoat and smoothing the fabric down over his stomach, and comfortable, despite the closer fit.

"…she said that name's in the histories," Ezra said, her voice getting louder and Dean turned to look at the curtain, picking up the jacket.

"…know for sure in a few hours."

"…lucky if you do. I thought he had…"

Drawing the jacket on, Dean looked in the mirror. It looked sharp, he had to admit. Better than the thrown-together look of their fed suits.

"You must be done by now," Ezra said, as she pulled aside the curtain unceremoniously and ran her gaze down and up him from head to foot.

"Good," she added, stepping up to him and tugging on the jacket to settle it, her hands immodestly checking the fit of the pants and making him jump, just a little. "Just let down the hem and I'll take a tuck in here," she said, holding the side of the jacket and looking past him to his reflection. "And here."

Dean looked at her through the mirror's reflection, hastily rearranging his expression to neutrality as he caught the look of annoyance on his face.

Ezra smiled. "Lucky for you I'm as good a barber as I am a tailor," she told him, her gaze on his hair. "Come on, get it off and sit down."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

In the mirror, a half hour later, Dean had to privately agree with Ness' comment. His mother wouldn't recognise him. Hell, his brother wouldn't have recognised him.

His hair was trimmed and slicked down, a ruler-straight part down one side and combed smooth and flat to his head. The shave was the closest he'd ever had, he thought, running his fingertips over the skin of one cheek a little wonderingly, leaving not even a trace of a shadow. The suit fitted him perfectly, black leather oxfords polished and gleaming from under the cuffs of the pants, and Ezra smiled from behind him, handing him a soft, black felt fedora and helping him into a silk-lined overcoat. He put the hat and tipped it to one side, grinning at himself.

"So, spill already," Ezra said, standing back to look at him critically. "What bucket of syrup you idjits step into?"

Ness cleared his throat. "Time travel," he said, looking at her. "What're the ponies?"

She turned away and walked to the racks of ready-made clothing, pushing aside a section. Dean's head snapped around at the soft rumble and his eyes widened slightly as a door appeared between the clothing.

"You got your interdimensional beings, of course," Ezra said, disappearing through it, her voice raised. "Angels, the more powerful demons, anything that doesn't belong here…"

"Don't think that's it, this is strictly penny ante," Ness said, following her. "What else?"

"Well," she said, coming back out through the racks of clothes with several books in her arms. "There are the Time Keepers."

"Time Keepers?" Dean asked, looking from her to Ness and back.

Ezra nodded and dumped the armful on the long sewing table. "Probably a handful who have some control over time. Or used to, back in the day."

Opening a book, she started to go through it. Behind her, Dean and Eliot looked over her shoulders at the pages. As she got about halfway through, memory hit Dean clearly.

"There," he said, stabbing a finger at a picture. "That was on his ring."

"Well, that's good news," Ezra said, looking over her shoulder at him.

"It is?"

"That's the mark of Chronos," she explained. "The God of Time."

"And, uh, how's that good?"

Smiling, Ezra said, "Well, he's been around since the beginning, but he's lost a lot of power. Compared to some of the others, he's gotten kind of slack." She turned to Eliot. "Most likely? He's killing these folks for their juice, so that he can move through Time."

"Awesome," Dean said sourly. "How'm I gunna ride him back to my time?"

"Well, you could let him grab you," she said, looking at him. "If you don't mind him using you for gasoline?"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

In the bright sunlight of early morning, the world in 1944 looked even more bizarre, Dean decided.

Sitting in Ness' awesomely comfortable tank of a Buick across the road from a diner, he sat up as a man walked in, taking a booth by the window and being served coffee.

"That's him," Dean said.

Ness adjusted his binoculars, looking at the man. "Kind of puny for a god."

"We taking him?"

"We're watching him," he said, lowering the glasses. Dean's attention narrowed as he saw the gold ring on Ness' left hand.

"You got a family?" he asked in surprise.

"Beautiful one," Ness confirmed. "You don't?"

"Uh, no." He looked through the windshield at the street. "How'd you find out about this? Get started?"

"Tracked a nest of vampires were turning folks in Cleveland," Ness told him, staring at the diner. "I didn't believe it, at first. Tried to talk my way out of it six ways from Sunday." He laughed harshly. "Then I tried all the old folklore methods."

Dean's nose wrinkled up in sympathy. "Not much help there."

"No," Ness agreed. "I met a man who said he came from a long line of vampire killers. He showed me the ropes and I - sometimes you just want to punch through the red tape with a silver bullet. You ever worked for the government?"

Dean shook his head and Ness nodded.

"Well, don't start," he advised. "Everything in triplicate and here's a crappy pension at the end. This," he added, waving a hand toward the diner. "This is clean. No paperwork, no trials, no technicalities. Just get the job done and go home."

"Don't you worry you're gonna bring something home that takes your family?" Dean asked, keeping his gaze fixed on the windshield.

"I don't leave _anything_ with enough body parts…" Ness told him, a soft menace in his voice. "…to follow me home."

Silence filled the car. Dean thought of his mother, making a deal she didn't know how to handle, a deal that killed her. He thought of his father, making another deal and leaving right when he was needed the most. Maybe it was different in this time.

Eliot looked around, one dark brow lifted. "How'd you get started?"

"I used to do it 'cause that's what my family did," Dean said absently, looking down at the gun in his hand.

"Hmm?"

"But my family, my friends...they just seem to keep dying," Dean continued, pulling in a breath as he added _or leaving_ silently. "To tell you the truth, I don't know why I'm doing much of anything anymore."

"Boo-hoo," Eliot said sharply and Dean looked around at him, startled. "Cry me a river, ya nancy," Ness continued, his lip curling up in a slight sneer. "Tell me, are all hunters as soft as you in the future?"

He pulled a hip flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the lid, tipping it back and drinking a mouthful. "Lemme tell you something, kid, gratis. Everybody loses everybody. And then one day, boom. Your number's up, but at least you're making a difference."

Was he, Dean wondered doubtfully? Was he making that much a difference that it was worth losing his family, his friends…him and Sam, they'd been the key to Lucifer's cage and it'd been on them to put the devil back. But lately…if Cas and Crowley had really wanted to nuke it out over Purgatory, how was that their problem? Or chasing down tablets and black-ooze-filled bigmouths? How was that on them? Why hadn't they wished Cas luck and gone their own way?

_It's called the Ring of Solomon. It marks the ability to give up your needs for the greater good, _Melanie's said out of memory.

Was this all his fault? Because he wouldn't let go, he wouldn't give up to save as many people as he could? Why the hell did it feel like it was his burden to carry? _Because of what you did in Hell_, a small, dark voice whispered back to him. _Can't find forgiveness without atonement, Dean. You already know you can't make up for what you've done._

"So enjoy it while it lasts, Winchester, 'cause hunting's the only clarity you're gonna find in this life. And that makes you luckier than most," Eliot said, breaking through his thoughts.

That was fucking hilarious, he thought sourly, rubbing his hand across his brow. Any more luck like that and it'd kill him. Clarity was not something he'd had in the life for years now. He didn't think he'd ever get it back…knowing what he was doing. Knowing what he wanted. The only thing he was currently sure of was that he'd never get what he wanted.

"You have to have something to fight for," Ness said to him. "You think I do this for all the John Q pencil-necks? No," he answered the question himself. "I do it because I have something to live for. A helluva something to live for."

He pulled out his wallet, flipping it open and easing out a worn and much-thumbed photograph from behind the Treasury identification card. Dean took it, tilting it to the light. It was a black and white portrait, showing a slender woman with an infectious smile, her arms encircling three children, a boy and two girls, ages ranging perhaps from nine or ten for the boy, down to pre-school age for the youngest girl. They looked happy, he thought. Healthy and beautiful and happy. He handed the picture back to the agent, his expression deliberately neutral.

"Every morning, when I open my eyes, I know what I'm doing, what I'm fighting for," Eliot said softly as he gently slid the photograph back behind the thick card. "You don't have that, you might as well be one of them."

Picking up the glasses again, he turned back to the diner without waiting for Dean to respond.

"Hello, nurse," he said, watching the slender blonde walk out of the diner and down the street. Dean turned to watch her, and looked back at the window of the diner. Snider had gone.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Canton, Ohio. Now.**_

Sam threw the match into the bowl and twisted away as the contents flamed to the ceiling, licking along the plaster. Abruptly, the light in the room turned to blood red, filling every space and there was a crash as two men materialised mid-air and fell to the floor.

"Dean!" Jody shouted, running to his prone figure as Sam dove across the floor for the branch that had been knocked from his brother's hand when he'd landed.

"No!" Chronos screamed at Dean, staggering to his feet as his attention zeroed in on the fallen man. "You! Destroyed everything!"

Jody thumbed back one of Dean's eyelids, shifting her hands beneath his shoulders as he blinked and shook his head.

"I didn't lie to her," he said groggily. "You didn't tell her the truth."

"She loved me!"

"She didn't know what you were!" Dean ground back, rolling onto his hip and supporting himself with one hand. "You didn't tell her anything – how the hell could she've loved you not knowing everything?!"

"You – I – I loved her," Chronos said, taking a step backward clumsily. "I wanted her to –"

"Hey, Chronos?!"

Sam stood behind the god and as Chronos turned, he thrust the branch into his chest, driving it deep. His eyes screwed up tight as pulses of white light filled the god's chest and twisted and writhed up his neck.

"Was that the best you got?" Sam asked him tightly as he released his hold and Chronos dropped to his knees.

"You want to know your future? I know your future. All the futures," Chronos croaked, looking from Sam to Dean. "It's being alone. Covered in black ooze. You can't fight it. You can't beat it. You deserve it."

His eyes rolled back as the light consumed his body from the entry point of the branch to the tips of his extremities.

"You alright?" Jody asked, sitting behind Dean.

Dean glanced at her and back to his brother. "Don't think so," he said tiredly.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"So, what was the story? He couldn't control Time, he was just thrown around from century to century until he met someone he wanted to stay in one place for?" Sam asked his brother, passing him a beer and taking the other chair on the porch.

Dean looked into the deepening dusk and nodded. "He thought he loved her, thought she loved him," he said. "Didn't take it too well when she found out he'd been killing people, and decided he was a monster."

For a long heavy moment, silence filled the space between them and Sam slowly realised where Dean had gone with that.

"It's not – Dean, this is not the same situation. You are not a monster. Terry knows everything you did, and she –"

"She doesn't – didn't – know everything, Sammy," Dean cut him off. "And she left anyway."

"That's not –"

"Gone is gone, Sam," Dean said, finishing his beer in a gulp. "Any hits on what Roman and the other bigmouths are doing?"

"No," Sam said stubbornly. "And you're going to listen to me – for once."

He perched on the edge of the chair, staring his brother down. "She did – _does_ – love you. She told me. In Dearborn, before you two – before the trial and Jo and the explosion. She made me promise not to tell you."

Dean looked at him for a long moment then turned his head away to watch the streetlights come on along the sheriff's quiet road. He didn't know if the stillness he could feel inside of himself was going to smash him into a million pieces or hold him together. He wanted to believe Sam. He didn't know how to, didn't even know if there was a point to believing…now.

"Bobby called in something weird while we were waiting for you to show up," Sam offered tentatively.

"Weird like how?"

"Seattle, some guys found with their hands and feet chopped off," Sam said, finishing his beer. "Weird thing was that it seems from security footage that the attackers were women half their size and, uh, Bobby went through Frank to get the police and coroner's reports and there's a heap of physical evidence at the scenes, but it's coming back non-human."

"Huh." Dean got up, the empty bottle swinging from one hand. "Lauren tagging along again?"

"No," Sam said, shaking his head as he got up as well. "Bobby wants to check out Rufus' old cabin in Montana. Lauren's going with him."

"Alright, split shifts, take us about twenty hours."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	5. Chapter 5 One Night Stand

**Chapter 5 One Night Stand**

* * *

It always rained in Seattle, Dean remembered wearily, hunching tighter into the corner of the car as he listened vaguely to the hiss of the tyres on the wet road and turned his head away from the glitter of oncoming headlights. In most of the state, he added to himself.

Sam was driving them west and north and the rain had started somewhere around Spokane and had been with them ever since. It drummed on the metal roof, an under-beat to the steady shoosh-blat of the wipers over the windshield. It pattered against the glass next to his face. It rushed down the steeper sections of the highway and occasionally was thrown into the car by the traffic going the other way.

_Rain had trickled down the windows of Bobby's house, a deluge that had started sometime around midnight and had just kept coming. Walking up the stairs in the darkness, Dean felt his heart thumping in counterpoint to that steady noise, over the roof and the walls and the panes of glass. He was nervous and on edge because the woman who was in the bedroom at the end of the hall on the second storey was somehow different to anyone else he'd met. Ordinary and normal…but not. Not at all._

He'd woken five hours earlier, mouth dry and head pounding, filled with the screams of the damned and the smell of sulphur and the taste of blood in his mouth. He hadn't had a dream like that in a while. It brought it back, searingly bright. How could he admit what had happened to him, what he'd done, down there? Terry had told him he hadn't turned into something else and he hadn't argued, hadn't believed it, had just left. Driven out of the house and into the car between wanting something he didn't think he was going to have, and fearing he already had it but the cost was going to be higher than he could pay.

When he'd come back, he'd taken his boots off at the front door and moved silently up the stairs. He'd watched her sleeping, curled up in a tight ball under the covers, the streetlights showing the tracks along her cheeks, the darker patches on the pillows. He should've turned around then, he thought, brows drawing together at the memory. Should've turned around and let it go.

When had he ever done that with Sam? Or his father? He couldn't make himself leave the bedroom either.

Undressing soundlessly, he'd inched his way onto the bed, under the covers and something had happened when he gotten close. Close enough for skin to touch skin and the warmth of her to seep into him. She'd sighed and relaxed, the pinched look on her face smoothing out and he'd felt…different. He hadn't known exactly what that difference was or what it meant. Only that the tension that had been knotting him up from the moment he'd woken in the middle of the night dissolved without fanfare, leaving him feeling _quiet_, in a way he hadn't felt since before his father had disappeared, before he'd gone to Palo Alto to find his brother.

Memory drifted into unconsciousness as the sounds of the car and the highway and his brother became more and more faint, left behind.

"_I didn't think you wanted to be here," she said, her eyes searching his, shadowed and uncertain._

"_Guess you got that wrong," he replied, pulling her close and stopping the questions he could see in them. _

It'd been different again, different from the other times. An unhurried exploration that had been give and take in a way he'd never had before. Cassie had been as hungry for him as he'd been for her, but there hadn't been a sense of sharing each other in that brief-lived relationship. They'd been slaking their hunger in each other, not trying to build it into something that had meant anything more. With Lisa, he'd known the first time he'd met her what it was she looked for. A part of him had been disappointed, just a bit, in that knowing. He'd seen it before and he knew it didn't change. With Terry…with Terry everything changed, every time and that part he'd missed, that one he'd sensed but hadn't really known about, had been there.

She had learned him as quickly as he had learned her, in every way, not just the physical. Learned the paths and hollows and clusters of nerves that lit up and chain-reactioned, exploding arousal until it was unbearable. She hadn't been obvious in her response to his touch, but he was experienced at picking up on those small things that told him if something was working and how well. And he'd never missed a step with her.

She'd known the things that he couldn't talk about and she'd known how to read him. He'd been slower at that, but he hadn't had her head-start. He'd wanted to catch up.

The memories collided with the emotions he refused to look at and the dream was more real than the reality of the car and the rain and the city getting closer. He tasted and touched, listened and watched and tried to cling to the vanishing feel of her under him, around him, senses drowning in a desire that was satisfied every time but never satiated fully.

"Morning," his brother's voice swept away the last of it, and Dean opened his eyes reluctantly, wishing he could've stayed there for a little bit longer.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The morgue was cool but not cold, but the shiver ran up Dean's back anyway as he looked down at the body, its flesh greyish-blue, darker underneath. _Then one day, boom, your number's up_. Ness' voice played in his head again. No denying that, he thought, his gaze catching on the puckered, bloodless lips of the amputation of the vic's left hand. According to the report Sam had passed over before they'd arrived, this guy had been thirty, working his way up whatever ladder he'd thought would bring him success, owned his own home. Then _boom_.

And he was standing here, pretending to be a federal agent, staring at a dead body.

_Every morning, when I open my eyes, I know what I'm doing, what I'm fighting for._

Son-of-a-bitch agent was talking way too much in his head, Dean thought, trying to bury the thoughts and concentrate to what his brother was doing.

"So," Sam walked around the long steel table. "What's our boy here weigh?"

Raymond, the coroner's assistant, looked down at the report in his hand. "Uh. A buck ninety. Thrown against a wall so hard it buckled," he said, shaking his head. "Based on the blood flow at the crime scene, the hands and feet were cut off while he was still alive, just like the others. The killer wanted him to suffer."

Dean looked expressionlessly at him. "If he'd wanted him to suffer he wouldn't have picked cuts that bled out so quick," he remarked. "All vics are male, right, with the same kind of, uh, artwork as this?"

"Yeah. Identical."

"Thanks for your time, Raymond," he said as he took several photos of the design cut into the victim's chest with his phone. "We'll be in touch."

Dean followed his brother into the hall. "You don't want to know about any other evidence they found?"

"Bobby sent the stuff from Frank through, it's in the file in the motel," Sam said distractedly, looking at the images on his phone. "I don't know, I've never seen this symbol before."

He looked up in time to avoid running into his brother's back as Dean came to a stop in the middle of the parking lot. Sam dropped a hand on his shoulder as Dean's expression remained drawn.

"Let's get a bite to eat, go back to the motel and haul out the laptop," he suggested, wondering if this was just the long drive and weird case, or if there was still a lot of fallout from what Chronos had said.

"Great idea," Dean nodded, turning to face him, his expression clearing. "Actually, that's a brilliant idea. Here's my counter. You do that, and I'll go undercover, mingle with the locals and uh, see what kind of clues bubble to the surface."

"You mean, go to a bar," Sam said flatly, turning to see the blue neon sign across the road that had grabbed Dean's attention when he'd come to a halt.

"Wow, if you want to oversimplify it."

"What's going on?" Sam asked. "This is a case."

Giving his brother a shrug, Dean said, "Yeah, and here," he added, pulling the newspaper he'd picked up in the morgue office from his coat. "Look at that."

Sam took the paper and looked at the front page. Six dead in pile-up on the interstate. Woman pushed off fourteenth storey balcony by boyfriend. Four people dead, food poisoning from local restaurant suspected.

Looking back at his brother's face, Sam said, "So?"

"That's eleven we couldn't do anything about, man," Dean pointed out. "Just today."

"You're right," Sam agreed. "We can't do anything about car accidents, regular murders or food poisoning." He threw the paper onto the asphalt. "We _can_ do something about monsters attacking people and killing them."

"You heard Chronos," Dean said, looking back at the bar. "We can't stop them."

"He didn't see his future, did he?" Sam demanded. "So he wasn't all-powerful. What's this really about?"

"Nothing," Dean told him, turning away. "I'm tired. I want a break. That's it."

"Dean…"

Dean walked away, his hands jammed in his pockets. He could feel Sam's gaze, pounding insistently at the back of his head, but he ignored it. What he wanted, he thought bitterly, was not to be him.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Sam watched him go. Of course it was about Terry, he thought. Everything had been about Terry, one way or the other, from the moment she'd disappeared from Bobby's yard almost five months ago.

Getting into the car, he started the engine and pulled out for the motel. Dean wouldn't talk about it. The closest they'd come had been a brief talk on the drive back after the Jersey thing. They'd gotten things straight between them, at least, and he'd seen his brother had been genuinely happy about that, but Dean had clammed up the minute that conversation had gone around to him.

He'd let it go because there wasn't a point to making Dean feel worse than he already was. In some ways, that constant litany that she was safer in her world was true, he couldn't argue that. In others, he could see that it'd broken something inside of his brother, something he didn't think anyone could fix.

Dean would rather die than admit to his feelings, Sam thought caustically as he waited for his burrito and salad at the restaurant four blocks from the motel. Would want to die if the alternative was having to say out loud that he'd needed someone and there was no one to fill the place she'd been.

He stopped the car in front of the room and got out, his brain still feverishly trying to work out a way getting his brother to deal with everything he hadn't been dealing with in the last few years.

In Girardeau, he'd been amazed to see that his big brother could be hurt by a relationship. He'd watched Dean pretending that he didn't care in every meeting with the fiery reporter and he'd realised that there were unexpected depths to his brother that he'd never even considered. He'd thought, when it came time to take Lucifer back to the cage, that extracting the promise from him to live a normal life was the best thing he could offer Dean. He hadn't seen the cost of that normal life with Lisa and Ben and he hadn't seen that his brother needed something that normal life couldn't provide, needed a meaning even when he was trying to deny it, and needed someone with him who he could trust, all the way through. Lisa had been a long way from someone like that.

He hadn't seen his brother's slow motion fall with Terry, not until it'd been too late. Even in Dearborn, there had been a lingering doubt when she'd admitted how she'd felt and had made him promise not to tell his brother. He'd forgotten how good Dean could be at hiding things he didn't want to be seen.

Dumping the take-out bag on the table, he sighed as he sat down and opened the laptop. His brother wasn't getting over it. If anything, he'd become more taciturn and withdrawn with every day that had passed. A few times now, Sam had woken in the night, hearing his struggles with his subconscious. He didn't know what those nightmares were about but the few questions he'd asked about them had been met with a stony silence or a pointed change of subject.

"_Your brother has walled himself in so tightly for so long now, that I'm not surprised that when he fell, he fell so hard that he couldn't get back up," Lauren had said to him, before they'd left Sioux Falls. The bedroom walls had been dappled in intermittent moonlight and her face had been washed in that mottled light, serious and making his heart skip a beat._

"_You think that's it?" Sam had asked doubtfully. He couldn't imagine it, not really, even when he'd seen Dean's reactions and the even more telling lack of reactions over the past few months._

"_Yes, I do," she'd said, pressing closer against him. "I think he's lost and he can't find a way to be who he was before."_

It fit, Sam supposed, opening the plastic container holding the burrito absently. It explained the recklessness that was appearing more and more, and the depression that seemed to follow those moments. He couldn't think of any way to help.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The door opened behind him, and Dean stumbled backwards into the apartment, the woman in front of him maintaining her fierce pressure on his mouth, the fingers of one hand undoing his clothing at the same time as she reached behind her to slam the door shut.

She was beautiful, long reddish gold hair, tall and full-breasted and slender-hipped, endless legs and she was so hungry for him he hadn't gotten more than a couple of mouthfuls of air since they'd gotten into the cab outside the club. It was all wrong, but he was trying to ignore that, painfully aware there was a touch of desperation to everything he was doing, hoping she wasn't feeling it too, or didn't care if she was.

His eyes were closed and it wasn't enough. He fought to keep his memories buried deep, undressing her as fast as she was undressing him and it felt…forced.

"We're not in a rush, are we?" he murmured against the smooth skin of her neck, hoping it would slow things down, make it easier to see the woman who was standing in front of him instead of the one in his head. "Got all night long."

She laughed, low in her throat, her lips brushing over his ear. "I want your cock fucking me deep, right now," she told him bluntly, and the image, and the soft slither of her tongue, sent a jolting shock right to his groin. He backed up to the bed and let himself fall back on it, watching as she crawled up over him, her face shadowed, her eyes wide and dark, staring while her hands touched and stroked and desire lit an inferno along his nerves.

It was all wrong, he thought despairingly and desperation grew in him. He rolled on top of her, trying to slow the wild kisses, catching her wrist in one hand. She rolled them back over, stronger than he'd thought, twisting her arm to free her hand. She was voracious, demanding, and finally he gave up trying to wrestle some control back, letting his eyelids close as her mouth and hands pulled responses from him and she enveloped him in a furnace of pressure, riding him hard and fast until it was all he could do to hold back. When he felt the hard ripples contracting around him, he groaned and came with a tangible feeling of relief, hearing her cry out as her body squeezed him and milked out every last fucking drop.

_**Two and a half hours later.**_

Dean opened his eyes as a languid rush of heat flowed through him and peered blearily down the length of his body. Lydia smiled at him, her fingers continuing their small circular stroking along the insides of his thighs. It hadn't been even an hour since the last time, he thought, his smile back a bit uneasy. He couldn't check that because it didn't look great to look at your watch in the middle of someone…well, doing what she was doing…but he was sure he wasn't going to be joining the party just yet.

He was wrong.

Muscles aching and nerve endings twitching in reaction, Dean let his head drop back onto the pillow as she rolled off him, uncaring of the sticky mess that was drying rapidly on and under him.

_Pussy-whipped._

It wasn't entirely accurate in the current usage of the term, but it described what he was feeling, he thought, easing himself to one side gingerly. The long muscles of his back and the backs of his thighs protested at the change in position.

"Here," Lydia said, pushing a bottle of water into his hand as he looked around at her.

She carried her own to the other side of the bed, dropping onto the mattress with a contented sigh and rolling easily onto an elbow as she lifted the bottle and swallowed several mouthfuls in quick succession. He looked at the bottle and shrugged internally. He probably was dehydrated.

"I like your stamina," she said, her smile a little secretive as she turned back to face him.

Stamina, he thought. As a cardiovascular workout, the last five hours had been…challenging. As a release from the tension that was knotting him into a pretzel, it'd been more effort than result.

Lydia leaned over and took the bottle from him, twisting around to set it on the nightstand next to hers. He felt himself flinch back a little when she closed the space between them, that secretive smile still playing on her lips.

"Just relax," she whispered against his mouth as she leaned over him. "We'll go real slow this time."

_**An hour and a quarter after that.**_

Dean looked at the ceiling vaguely, gradually registering the change across the smooth white plaster of the light from the window.

Daybreak.

He yawned, jaw cracking and turned his head cautiously to look at the woman lying next to him, finding not one speck of desire in the sight of the curves of shoulder down to waist, the rising mound of her hips and the taut roundness of her ass. He wondered a bit bleakly if he'd ever be aroused again.

Every muscle and tendon was complaining. It hurt to pull in a deep breath and he wondered if he'd cracked a rib. He was too damned tired to sleep and too exhausted to stay awake and from the steady breathing of the woman next to him, she was already sleeping, apparently finally satiated.

He'd wanted a night off, a night to lose himself in someone who didn't want anything more than that, to forget about the thoughts and memories that hovered around him all the damned time, a night to really pretend to be someone else. Someone without his life. He didn't think this night had done all that well on those counts.

Fifteen minutes later, he was just starting to drift off when Lydia's alarm went off, shattering the morning quiet. The mattress dipped as she rolled immediately out of the bed, moving fast around the room and picking up his discarded clothing.

"Come on, I've got an early morning meeting," she said, tossing the bundle of shirt, jacket, pants, boxers and socks onto the bed next to him. "You have to go."

"Wh-what?" he grumbled, fatigue dragging at him as he sat up. "Not even a coffee?"

"One block down on the right," she told him succinctly, stopping at the bathroom door. "Great espressos. That's your choice, isn't it?"

She didn't wait for an answer, going into the bathroom and shutting the door. He heard the shower going and rubbed both hands over his face as he looked around the apartment and squinted at the sunshine flooding through the tall windows.

It was good to feel appreciated, he thought acidly to himself, getting out of the bed and starting to dress.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Clutching a huge cardboard cup of black coffee, Dean saw his brother across the street and walked over, his stomach grumbling furiously about the lack of breakfast carbs and grease. He didn't have a hangover but that was the only silver lining he could find.

"You look like crap," Sam commented as they met.

"Yeah, well I feel worse than I look," Dean admitted, slurping down another mouthful of the hot liquid. He caught his brother's speculative look and realised that hadn't been the impression he'd wanted to give. "I do recommend the Cobalt Room, by the way," he added quickly, glancing casually down the street. "Awesome night. Although, I think I'm getting too old for this."

Sam opened his mouth and Dean decided he didn't want to hear whatever it was his brother was going to say.

"You get anything on that symbol?"

"Not yet," Sam said as they walked up the steps of the portico to the apartment building. "I did check with the neighbours of the previous attacks. Something came up."

"Yeah, what?" Dean yawned as they waited for the elevator.

"Four guys, two of them were married," Sam said, dropping his voice as the lift pinged and the doors opened, three people walking quickly past them. "One of the others was engaged. All of them cheated on their other halves."

"Yeah, well, people slip up." Dean frowned. "This isn't a Woman in White."

"No, I don't think so either," Sam agreed quickly. "Might be nothing, but one of the neighbours was a good friend of the vic and he said the guy married his wife right out of high school, totally in love with her, and he'd been surprised as hell when he'd told him."

"Siren?" Dean pondered. "They don't usually go all Scarface over their vics."

"The last one made the vics kill for them," Sam said, nodding. "It doesn't feel like it."

"Well, this makes vic number five, let's see what that tells us," Dean said as the floor number pinged and the doors opened.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The wind moaned as it came between the two narrowly spaced buildings, and Sam saw his brother shiver slightly.

"Where's your coat?"

Dean made a face. "Left it at Lydia's place this morning."

"Who's Lydia?"

"My, uh, workout partner from last night."

Snorting, Sam said, "What are you – trying to get a second date?"

"Hey," Dean protested. "She had an early meeting and I didn't even get a shower or coffee."

"Wait a minute – she threw you out?"

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up," Dean grumbled, feeling another blast of cold, damp wind trickle down the back of his neck. "I gotta get that damned thing back."

He pulled out his phone and dialled the number. "Hey, uh…oh, Lydia, it's, uh Dean, from last night. Left my coat at your place. Gimme a call back."

"You know her name and you called her," Sam's voice rose a bit as he grinned.

"Bite me."

"And she gave you her number, that's sweet," Sam continued, unable to resist. At least his brother hadn't spent the night drinking himself into oblivion.

"They always give you their number," Dean told him dryly, ignoring the exception to that rule who popped into his head. "Another guy who cheated, you send that to Bobby and Lauren?" he asked, hoping the subject change would be honoured.

"Soon as we got out of there," Sam nodded. "Lauren sent a message saying they might have something, they're emailing the files."

"I'm freezing," Dean complained, turning up the ridiculously inadequate collar of his suit jacket. "I'm gonna grab my coat, I'll meet you back at the motel later."

"Sure," Sam agreed.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Seven hours later.**_

Dean paced across the motel room, dodging the low table next to the sofa as he wheeled around to make a return crossing.

"So what?" Sam looked at him curiously. "I mean, so maybe she has another kid she didn't tell you about."

"Nope, just the one," Dean said, slowing and shaking his head. "Emma. But last night, when I was with her, she didn't have any. And I was at her place, man. There was no playpen, no blankets, no rubber ducks.

"Right," Sam said doubtfully. "Like you would have been focused on that kind of thing."

"Hey, that's the first thing you notice. Red flags," Dean told him defensively, heading for the kitchen and extracting two beers from the small fridge. He walked back and handed one to his brother.

"Then, all of a sudden, boom – baby," he added, knocking the top off his and gulping a mouthful. "And not one of those red-faced newborns, this kid was standing up."

"Yeah, the one you thought talked," Sam said noncommittally.

"Oh, it talked. And not baby talk, either," Dean asserted, throwing himself into the armchair and staring broodingly at the bottle in his hands.

"Now you know so much about child development?"

"I know enough to know that they don't say, "Hey, Mom. Who's _that_ guy?" So, cut to this afternoon and Lydia's handing this kid who's calling her mommy over to these two women, right? But this is not a baby. No, no, this kid's got to be five. And same name – Emma."

"You know, George Foreman named all his sons George," Sam remarked.

Scowling at him, Dean said, "Are you deliberately messing with me?"

"Just sayin', this is kind of –"

"Dude, I know weird. Okay? There is no non-weird explanation for this. This morning, Emma was a baby. By sunset, she's Hannah Montana. Early years." He shook his head, lifting his bottle again. "What about the other vics? Anything to tie them together other than cheating on their girls?"

"Yeah, I pulled a bunch of cold cases, from all over the country. There's a two-year pattern, Dean," Sam said, tapping a finger on the files on the table. "Between six and nine men killed, hands and feet chopped off, symbol carved into their chests. The hook seems to be a local club or bar, some up-market pick up joint that all the vics frequent."

"In Chicago, eight guys were found dead and mutilated. In Miami, it was six," Sam continued, flipping open a folder. "Here, we're up to five already, and the common hangout looks like being –"

"The Cobalt Room," Dean said flatly.

The shrill ring of Sam's phone cut through the conversation and Sam pulled it out, opening the laptop as he put the phone on speaker and set it down.

"What do you got, Bobby?" he asked, bringing up the files they'd gotten earlier.

"Alright, that symbol? It's Greek, a variation of the sigil for Harmonia, one of the earliest Greek goddesses, before the pantheon, even."

"Get to the fun stuff," Dean grunted, getting up and standing behind Sam's chair. Over his brother's shoulder he looked through the images that Sam was bringing up.

"Oh, it gets fun alright," Bobby assured him. "Harmonia and Ares had kids, all daughters. Known as the Amazons."

"Like Wonder Woman?" Dean asked. Sam rolled his eyes at the screen.

"No, you idjit," Bobby growled. "These gals really existed, a whole sub-culture of tribes of just women, stronger, faster than most men. They had a ritual mating with whatever unlucky bastards were nearby and after they were pretty sure they were knocked up, they killed the guys, after cutting off various body parts."

"Awesome."

"Sam?" Lauren's came over the phone's speaker. "The sacrifice of the males was directly for the goddess. She gave them near super-powers, incredible strength and accuracy with all weapons. They're not going to be easy to take out."

"There's more," Bobby warned. "These girls were practically wiped way back when and the deal with Harmonia pretty much turned them into non-human monsters."

"Their gestation rate is unbelievably fast," Lauren interjected. "Less than twelve hours after impregnation they give birth. The child grows at the same extraordinary rate, reaching maturity in thirty-six hours or less."

Sam looked at Dean, one brow lifting. "We, uh, might be seeing that."

"What?" Bobby's voice squawked out of the speaker. "Tell me that idjit didn't –"

Dean leaned forward. "We'll get back to you, Bobby." He cut the call and looked at Sam.

"Lydia's kid."

"Dean, I mean, wow…" Sam said, looking at him. "So maybe, I mean, you're the –"

"Don't say it."

"Look, if that kid's yours –"

"I _said_, don't say it!"

"Fine," Sam said with a shrug. "I won't. But Dean, dude, seriously…a one-night stand and you…roll the dice? You don't even –"

Brows drawn together, Dean snapped, "Of course not, whaddaya think, I'm brain-dead? Accidents happen…if one even did…which, I-I-I don't think –"

He stopped talking and walked to the window. "No, you know what? We're – stop. We're not gunna talk about this any more 'cause my skin's starting to crawl!"

Sam sighed. "Alright, fine. But if it's true, if it happened…"

"Yeah, I know," Dean said, looking at the floor. "I gotta hang onto my hands and feet."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Four hours later.**_

The wipers cleared the rain and the glass flooded again, the reflections through the streaming water mottling as the lights of oncoming vehicles filled the interior of the car. Dean sat in the passenger seat, staring at the lights without seeing them.

"Look, man, she wasn't yours. Not really," Sam said, as they passed out of the city limits.

"Actually, she, uh, she was, really," Dean said quietly, leaning back into the seat. "She just also happened to be a crazy man-killing monster. But, uh, hey."

The complete rat's nest of impressions and emotions and thoughts of the last few hours was still roiling around in his head. He didn't know how he'd felt about the girl who'd shown up the door, who'd told him he was her father. The sense that he'd lost something throbbed behind it all, even though he knew that he hadn't, not in the way he'd wanted it.

"You know what? Bobby's right. Your head's not in it, man. When Ben almost died, you were wobbly, but now..."

"Now what?" Dean challenged, turning to look at him. "Oh, what, you're dealing with all your shit so perfect? Yeah, news flash, pal – you're just as screwed up as I am! You're just... bigger."

"What?!"

"I don't know!" It'd been right up next to his teeth to tell his brother that he had Lauren, someone. He'd bitten it back because it couldn't help. And it wasn't fair. None of it was fair.

"Look...Dean, the thing is, tonight...all this crap you're carrying around and not dealing with almost got you killed. Now, I don't care how you deal. I really, really don't. But just don't – don't get killed," Sam said, letting that plea at the back of his mind come out.

"I'm not looking for a way out, Sammy," he replied, several minutes later when the silence in the car had thickened to the consistency of honey.

"Could've fooled me," Sam muttered ungraciously under his breath. He caught a glimpse of his brother's smile from the corner of his eye and felt a spurt of surprise.

"Yeah," Dean agreed, knowing how some of the things he'd done in the last couple of months had looked. "It's just – I just – I thought – and then –"

He couldn't say it. His chest was tight and breathing was hard but he tried again. "I thought things were gonna be different."

"I know," Sam said quickly, knowing the struggle it'd taken for Dean to admit even to that. "I did too."

"I would've killed Emma, Sam," Dean said quietly. "I get it didn't look like it, but that wasn't the way I thought – I would've."

"Okay." Sam waited for him to continue, throwing a quick sideways glance when he didn't. "I know this is hard, okay? But I meant it. Don't screw up now –"

"I'll do what I can."

"Well, what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I'll do what I can. All right? You can shut up about it," Dean snapped, his meagre store of patience worn away by the shouting in his head. He hunched away from his brother to look out the side window.

He couldn't deal with it he'd wanted to tell Sam. But that wouldn't come out, no matter how many times he'd tried to phrase it. Every case they'd worked in the last five months had hammered something else at him that was a reminder of some kind and he couldn't figure a way to let her go the way he'd done with Lisa. Maybe he was being unrealistic. Maybe he was obsessing. He didn't know. He just couldn't shut out his memories and he couldn't shut down the feelings that meandered in and out of his thoughts like driftwood on the tide and he couldn't get away from the constant goddamned pain of knowing that was all gone and he'd never get it back.

He wasn't looking for a way out. That was the truth. He just wasn't looking as hard at the things he got himself into as he'd done before. He had the feeling that's what his brother was really worried about. The bigmouths had taken over one of the most powerful corporations in the world and were positioning themselves to take everything over. How were two guys supposed to fight them? Maybe this time their luck wouldn't hold and it'd be over. The way he felt right this minute, it'd be a relief.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	6. Chapter 6 Running on Ice

**Chapter 6 Running on Ice**

* * *

The bedroom was still dark but around the curtains covering the windows, cracks and streaks of light seeped through. Dean looked around, reassuring himself that he was in the sheriff's house, in the little bedroom he'd gone to sleep in the night before, and that the dream he'd woken from was just that…a dream, and gone.

He looked at his watch. Less than three hours this time. The last good sleep had been the night they'd gotten back here, after twenty hours driving and the cumulative debt he'd racked up from the previous two days. He'd slept for six hours with no dreams, probably due to the fact that he'd been ready to collapse. It hadn't been repeated.

"Morning," Jody said to him as he walked into the kitchen, his nostrils flaring appreciatively at the smell of coffee, bacon and eggs and biscuits that filled the room.

"Siddown before ya fall down," Bobby said tersely. Since the sling had come off, he was moving around a lot easier, but had become more grumpy, Dean thought. Something was going on between the old man and the sheriff, although he'd never caught them doing anything in particular.

"Look at this," Bobby growled at him as he dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. He waved a remote at the tv sitting on the kitchen counter, and Dean saw a police chase showing, a sleek black car dodging traffic with six cops in pursuit. Even from the top, the black car was instantly identifiable. The helicopter footage stopped and the anchor came back on.

"So far, the duo have killed forty-six people across three states," the sleekly-coifed man was saying. "Dean and Samuel Winchester have now become the FBI's Most Wanted for their crime spree over the last three days."

"WHAT!?"

"Since you've been getting your beauty sleep around here for the last three days, I'm guessing that ain't you two," Bobby said sourly. "Which means –"

"Those sons-of-bitches Xeroxed us!" Dean sputtered, looking around as Sam and Lauren came into the room. "That fucking well does it! We're finding these ass monkeys and killing them ourselves!"

"Good plan," Bobby commented mildly. "Since everyone from Dave the butcher to the head of the CIA has seen your ugly mugs on the idiot box this morning. I'm sure you'll get, oh, maybe twenty miles out of the county before you're picked up."

"He's right, Dean," Jody said, setting a heaped plate of heart-killing food in front of him. "We got a special bulletin about you two before dawn this morning. Every law enforcement agency has got them and you're priority number one."

"Awesome!" Dean picked up his cutlery and stabbed at the bacon. "We supposed to sit around here like rats in a trap?"

"No," Bobby said thoughtfully. "No, you go see a friend of mine. Get things cleaned up and see if he can't help you to figure out what these bastards are doing."

"They're squeezing us," Sam said, sitting down next to his brother and nodding his thanks as Jody put a plate of poached eggs and toast down in front of him. "Making sure we can't move at all."

"Well, then, Frank's the only who's gonna be able to help," Bobby said reasonably.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**One day later.**_

"Good luck," Frank said, slapping Sam on the shoulder as he passed him.

"Thanks, Frank," Sam said, looking at his new identification.

The super-paranoid conspiracy theorist turned around and looked at him. "For what? Sending you to your death? Your doubles want to be on candid camera, put you in the line of fire," he said, waving a hand around vaguely. "Now, I'd lay low, 'cause I love life and its infinite mysteries. But you two want to be dumb, that's fine. At least have the common sense to ditch your car."

"Wh – uh, excuse me – what?" Dean stared at him.

"Your doublemints – they're using a car just like the one outside," Frank told him cheerfully.

"Sonofabitch!"

"And plural," Frank agreed noncommittally. "I gotta place you can stash that. You need something…inconspicuous to get around in."

"Ideas?"

"You're the car thief," Frank retorted, pulling a map from a drawer in his desk. He passed it to Dean. "Take that one as well. Maybe something'll occur to you on the way."

"Uncle Fred's boathouse?" Dean lifted the map, peering at the handwritten note. "You kidding me?"

"Do I look like I'm kidding you?" Frank asked tonelessly.

Dean glanced at his brother. "Fine."

"Fine."

"Let's go," Sam said.

It was a four hour drive to the boathouse and Dean bitched the entire way, mostly under his breath unintelligibly, but the steady droning of his complaints were aggravating his brother, he could see that.

"Drop me off in the town," Sam said as they took the off ramp, following Frank's instructions. "I'll get a car and come and get you."

Dean nodded, pulling over at the end of the main street. He watched Sam get out and start walking slowly down the street and eased the car out onto the road, the suspension getting a work-out as the asphalt petered out to a rough gravel road that ran around the lake.

Bigmouths running a squeeze on them. His baby on lockdown in some nothin' town in the middle of nowhere. Bobby's home more-or-less off-limits to them because every goddamned thing knew about it.

Under it all, the same unending and non-diminishing feelings he'd had for the last ten weeks. He muttered a string of invective that would've blistered paint and turned down a rutted driveway as he saw the name of the house through a thick screen of trees.

The boathouse was there, as promised. Driving the Impala inside it, Dean stopped the engine and sat there for a few minutes, listening to the metal of the hot engine tick as it cooled, his forehead resting against the wheel.

He shouldn't have let himself hope that his life could be more than what it was, he thought. Should never have let himself think, for even a second, that he might have what he'd wanted. Should've told Cas to take Terry back to her world straight away, never talked to her, never listened to her, never touched her. She shouldn't have been this hard to forget about. He didn't know why she was.

Huffing out a breath filled with impatience for himself, he got out of the car and opened the trunk, pulling out the big tarpaulin and shutting the lid. Next to Uncle Fred's small motorboat, the Impala looked nice and anonymous sitting there, all her sleek beauty hidden by the dull tan tarp.

"Cas," Dean murmured, looking across the lake. "You there?"

There was the sound of fluttering wings and the angel appeared, looking at him carefully.

"What is it, Dean?"

"How soon could you take me there?" Dean asked, licking his lips nervously at the thought of it.

"Take you there?"

"To Terry's world," he elaborated, irritation rising. Bad enough he was even contemplating this, he didn't need the angel making him spell out every detail. "If we needed information from her show or whatever."

"Another two or three weeks and this plane and that one will lie close enough to step across," Cas said. "I thought you wanted her to remain safe?"

"I do," Dean said, turning away. "But we're running out of options here. And she can stay there, I just need to talk to her."

"It's a risk, drawing attention to her in that world."

He knew that already. He'd wanted to leave her alone, to respect her obvious desire to be as far away from them – from him – as possible. He looked at the small half-circle that lay under the base of his index finger and frowned.

"Yeah," he said. "Last resort."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"They're following our case locations," Sam grunted as they headed east. "Jericho, Black Water Ridge, Manitoc…they're following the first cases we worked after Jess' death."

"So we can get ahead of them?" Dean asked, half his attention on the car's engine and the little rattle he could hear from under the hood.

"Maybe, St Louis was the next job," Sam said. "The shifter."

Nodding, Dean thought about the fastest route and put his foot down, the headlights lighting up the road in front of them.

"I can't believe you stole this piece of crap," Dean said a minute later, glaring at the squeaky pony hanging from the rear-view mirror. Sam looked up in time to see the string holding the toy to the mirror cut and hear the last protesting squeak as it was flung into the backseat.

"Not much choice," Sam told him defensively, slightly relieved that the pony itself hadn't been stabbed, mutilated and thrown out onto the highway. "You, uh, want some tunes?"

At Dean's shrug, he reached for the radio and turned it on.

...

_I wish I could carry your smile in my heart_

_For times when my life seems so low_

_..._

Sam looked at the radio in horror. "Sorry, man, I-I..."

For a moment, Dean didn't respond, just stared at the highway. Then he shrugged. "Just leave it. Probably gonna be the only thing on."

...

_It would make me believe what tomorrow could bring_

_When today doesn't really know, doesn't really know_

_..._

Looking back at the map, Sam closed his eyes, trying to remember what had come after St Louis. The preacher's daughter and the ghost that had attached itself to her, he thought. Then…there'd been…

The music, sugary sweet and laden with heartache, filled the car and Dean listened to the lyrics unwillingly, feeling his throat tighten.

...

_I'm all out of love_

_I'm so lost without you_

_I know you were right_

_Believing for so long_

_..._

…the bugs, in Oklahoma. Oasis Plains, Oklahoma, Sam thought. Was there anything for the leviathans to even find there now? He caught a movement in the corner of his eye and turned his head to see his brother singing softly along with the song, eyes half-closed and driving by feel.

...

_I'm all out of love…_

_..._

Dean ducked his head, coughing slightly as he kept his eyes straight ahead, fixed on the road. Sam's questioning stare was like a laser on him.

...

…_what am I without you?_

_..._

Sam looked back at the map. After Oklahoma…he frowned. "They missed two towns," he said, turning back to see his brother's mouth close with a sharp snap.

...

_I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong._

_..._

"Huh?"

"After Manitoc," Sam said, looking at him carefully. "They missed Nazareth and Toledo."

...

_I want you to come back and carry me home…_

_..._

"What?"

"The demon on the plane, and uh, Bloody Mary?"

...

_Away from these long, lonely nights…_

_..._

"Oh, uh, maybe they didn't know about them?"

"They know everything about us, apparently," Sam argued. "Okay, Nazareth I can understand, it's tiny, but Toledo?"

...

_I'm reaching for you, are you feeling it too?_

_Does the feeling seem oh, so right?_

_..._

"No clue," Dean said shortly, turning his head slightly away from his brother and syncing to the song just on the side that Sam couldn't see.

...

_And what would you say if I called on you now_

_And said that I can't hold on?_

_..._

Sam stared at him. He was still singing, so low it was barely audible over the rattles and tinny sound of the hatchback's engine, but he could hear it.

...

_There's no easy way, it gets harder each day_

_Please love me or I'll be gone, I'll be gone_

_Ohhhhhhh…what are you thinking of?_

_What are you…_

_..._

"You know what?" Sam said suddenly, reaching for the radio. "This song really blows."

He turned it off and silence filled the car. Not quite silence, Sam thought. He could almost hear the song continuing in his brother's head, looking at the tiny twitches and tics of Dean's profile as he kept it locked down in his throat. It was bad, he thought. It couldn't get much worse if his brother was being affected by sappy love songs.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The motel room was dark and quiet, but the song wouldn't stop playing and Dean rolled over for the hundredth time, exhaling loudly as the syrupy lyrics insisted on an encore, or maybe the fucker was on repeat, he couldn't tell anymore.

_I'm lying alone with my head on the phone_

_Thinking of you till it hurts_

_I know you hurt too but what else can we do_

_Tormented and torn apart_

He thought about going to the bathroom and just sitting in the shower, letting the noise of the water drown it out of his mind. It'd been a big judgement error on his part to let the song play in the car, and he'd known that, but he'd been tired and pissed at the car and that wistful stupid acoustic guitar had somehow caught at him and betrayed him.

_I wish I could carry your smile in my heart_

_For times when my life seems so low_

_It would make me believe what tomorrow could bring_

_When today doesn't really know, doesn't really know_

No, today didn't have the first freakin' idea, he thought bitterly. He tried to force himself to think about something else, anything else…then the chorus came in.

_I'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you_

_I know you were right, believing for so long_

_I'm all out of love, what am I without you_

_I can't be too late to say I was so wrong_

It wasn't leaving, wasn't stopping and there was only one thing left to do. Getting up, Dean dragged on his jeans and coat, leaving the rest of his clothes on the floor. He looked at the bed his brother was shaking with his snores and headed for the door, slipping out and walking to the car.

"_You're listening to Radio KCQQ 106.5 on your FM dial, and this is Steve running the Midnight Special just for you folks who can't sleep without some solid rock…_"

Sighing in relief, Dean crunched himself into the minute back seat of the hatchback, pulling his coat tighter around him as the comfortingly familiar opening guitar chords crashed through the cheap speaker system and drove out everything else.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Sunshine sparkled on the rippled water, sending darts of light into their eyes as they pulled the sacks from the back of the hatchback and carried one each out along the weathered dock.

"They know about Terry, man," Dean said tightly as he heaved the sack as far out into the lake as he could. Sam nodded, throwing his sack out as well.

"I know, I heard them," he said. He watched as Dean closed his hands into fists, crossing his arms and tucking them beneath to hide the shaking in them. "There's nothing they can do –"

"That we know of," Dean cut him off, looking at the reservoir.

"No one can open a door to her world, except the angels," Sam said steadily. "Not even Crowley could."

"They're older –"

"But not in that stuff, Dean, you know that," Sam said with enough certainty to be reassuring, he hoped.

"They know everything we know," Dean said, walking to the railing of the dock and gripping the splintery wood tightly. "Everything. So they'll know about how Cas took her back –"

"So what, man?" Sam followed him and dropped a hand on his brother's shoulder, squeezing through the coat. "They can't find Cas."

"No."

"So they can't get there," Sam said again. He felt the muscles relax a bit under his grip. "So, let's get to the payphone Frank specified and see what's he got? Okay?"

"Yeah," Dean said slowly. "Okay."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

They'd split up, Sam in a late-model Jeep and Dean in a two-door '73 Cougar whose gold paint job had seen better days. Sam had agreed it would keep them further off the bigmouth radar than travelling together. The cars they'd chosen said a lot about them, really. His brother insisted that the Jeep was for the headroom.

The information centre was empty and Dean hunched against the cold, looking accusingly at the payphone near the side of the parking lot. Frank and his protocols. He almost jumped when the damned thing rang, then hurried to it, manoeuvring himself with distaste through the plexiglass doors and picking up the handset with two fingers.

"Hello?" he said, closing his eyes briefly as Frank demanded the identification phrase. "'I am the Eggman.'"

Beside the Jeep, Sam looked over at him, dimples showing as he smiled. In the booth, Dean ground his teeth and rolled his eyes.

"Seriously, Frank, pay phones? I mean, come on. I – I'm getting the clap off this thing just touching it," he complained. "Fred Savage? Really? Yeah…no, I know, big mouths are everywhere."

He sighed. He had no doubts about Frank's skills. It was the messed-up wiring in the guy's head that bothered him.

"Uh, well, since you asked, some actual intel on the Dick Roman guy would be nice," he said when Frank stopped talking. "Fine. All right."

"C'mon - yeah, 'Biggles' out," he said reluctantly, hanging up the phone with a scowl at his hand. Without touching the bi-fold door, he eased himself back out of the booth.

"I hope he finds something quick. This whole protocol du jour thing's really creeping my cheese," he grumbled to his brother, wiping both hands on his coat.

"So, we got dick on Dick?"

Dean cocked a sour look at him. "That's a vivid way of putting it. You find anything on Wonder Woman?"

"No," Sam said, shaking his head. "And there probably won't be. They are definitely gone. But..."

He lifted the paper he'd been reading. "...I might have found something over in Kansas."

"Do I want to know how you found a copy of the Wichita Sun here? No," Dean muttered. "All right, well, let's do it."

He walked to the Cougar, the one bright spot in his day. "I'll see you at Rosita's in a couple of days."

Nodding, Sam turned to the Jeep behind him and got in. At the very least, the very, very least, he could listen to his own music for two sweet days. And he considered, his forehead wrinkling up as he started the engine, if Dean needed to wallow, he could do on his own, without adding further brain-addling images to his little brother's memories.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Rosita's was a café down near the off-ramp and Dean's mouth twitched into a slight smile as he pulled into the parking lot, seeing his brother's Jeep already parked by the doors. The two days alone had helped, he thought, the long, empty miles letting him de-tangle a lot of the crap in his head without the need to hide what he feeling or pretend to be feeling something he wasn't. He wasn't sure what the end result had been, exactly, but he felt like he could concentrate on the job, at least.

Inside, Sam was sitting in a booth, surrounded by clean plates that advertised he'd just consumed a large but healthy breakfast. The waitress smiled at him as she picked up the bowl with muesli and yoghurt still adhering to the sides and a second bowl with unidentifiable seeds and juice at the bottom.

"Uh, I know what I want," he said as she moved by him. "Breakfast special."

"Sure, hon, be just a minute," she said over her shoulder as she kept going. "Coffee?"

"Black."

Sam looked up. "What took you so long?"

"Slept in," Dean said glibly as he sat down. "Whaddya got?"

"Police reports and an ME's report that's…well, see for yourself."

Taking the slim file his brother slid across the table, Dean flipped it open to the pictures.

"Guessing those are not the fun kind of hickeys?"

"You'd be right," Sam agreed. "They're sucker marks from octopus tentacles."

"Big octopus."

"ME's still got the body so we can take a look in person, but extrapolating from the size, there's only one kind of octopus in the world that could leave marks like that."

"And you know what kind that is." Dean gave his brother a measured look.

"_Enteroctopus dofleini_," Sam confirmed, ignoring the look. "Giant Pacific Octopus, largest recorded octopus, with an official live weight record of seventy-one kilograms."

"It's like watching the Discovery channel," Dean said, moving along the seat as his coffee arrived, along with a big plate of pancakes, bacon, hash browns and toast. "They, uh, hang out in Kansas much?"

"Surprisingly, no," Sam said. "Usual habitat is between sixty-five metres and the surface in the North Pacific ocean."

"Do they even survive out of water?"

"Not for extended periods of time."

"So, since the town doesn't stink like last week's seafood basket, was it just zapped back once it killed the dude?" Dean asked around a mouthful of hash.

"Good question." Sam agreed.

"And that chopped-up mess in the guy's neck?"

"Another good question," Sam said, pulling the file back to look at the autopsy photograph. "I'm pretty sure that'll be from the beak of the octopus. They do prey on small sharks."

Dean blinked at him as he chewed his bacon and Sam exhaled, changing the subject hurriedly. He couldn't help it that he retained facts about stuff like this.

"So, we got a couple of contenders."

"Witchcraft."

Sam nodded. "Curses, specific or general."

"Wishes gone wrong?" Dean asked, reading the file upside down.

"The forty-seven year old businessman wished for an octopus?" Sam asked him, forehead creasing up.

"No, his eight-year-old kid might've," Dean said, waving his fork at the file. Sam fastidiously wiped off the drop of ketchup that had landed on it as he read the victim's details.

"Talk to the family."

"Yeah," Dean sighed, pushing his plate aside and draining his coffee. "I hate that fucking suit, man."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**Two days later.**_

The basement wasn't a standard franchise store room, Dean thought, looking at the ceramic charcoal brazier and the candles burning here and there around the room. When all the other employees of Plucky's had been questioned, Howard was the only piece left on the board. There was doubt in Dean's mind that he'd found himself a winner.

"Yeah, that's perfectly normal?" he remarked aloud to himself as he passed the open fire and directed his flashlight beam along the wall. It lit up a section covered in kids' drawings. The placemat pop psychology format was easy to recognise. The beam stopped on one drawing, a child falling, mouth open, eyes screwed shut. Looking more closely at it, Dean realised that the kid wasn't falling, he was surrounded by fish and seawood. Drowning, he thought. Beside it, pinned to the wall, a photograph showed two boys, grinning over a birthday cake with 'Happy Birthday, Howard' on the top.

He turned away from the wall and walked past the brazier to a table further in. On the top, a book lay open, diagrams of spell circles neatly drawn on the pages. It took him a few seconds to register that the letters for the spells were Hebrew, a moment longer to see the Enochian sigils for the archangels used for every circle. Drawing on their power, he wondered? Or hiding behind their protection? He really had to ask Cas who the hell was running things up there now that Michael was trapped in the cage, and Gabriel and Raphael were both dead.

Behind the book, several wax figurines had been cast and sculpted – a clown, a lion…and some…thing he had no clue about, playing a horn. Old books were piled on the table, another one open to a chapter on sympathetic magic. Mix and match hoodoo, he thought, reaching out to close the spell book. Under it, there was another placemat, with a drawing of a robot, shooting red laser beams from its eyes. Something for Tyler's mom to look forward to meeting, he thought.

"Drop it!"

Howard was behind him, and Dean turned slowly, sighting him by the boiler.

"I said drop it!" Howard snapped, taking a half-step closer. Crouching, Dean set the gun on the floor.

"Mm-hmm. Now kick it over," Howard told him, waving the barrel of the revolver.

Pushing the gun with his foot, it slid closer to Howard. "Some pretty heavy hoodoo you got here," he remarked. "I gotta say, as far as I know, none of these things, uh, can poop out a unicorn."

Howard walked toward him, the burning brazier between them. "There's power in fear. And when a child draws what he's afraid of, a little of that power ends up on the page," he said, looking involuntarily toward the wall of drawings.

Someone had some pretty big fears, Dean thought, seeing the look. "So, what, you toss it in the fire, and some bed-wetter's horror show comes to life?"

Howard frowned, his expression momentarily vague. "I got to get something off the parent, too. Something they own. That bit gets tricky."

"Well, it hasn't seemed to slow you down," Dean said bracingly.

The tone caught at the other man and his attention sharpened. "I'm just doing what I need to!"

"Okay. Okay," Dean said pacifically, holding his left hand up in clear sight. "I get it. Okay?"

The spell book was in his right and he threw it, underhand and with all the power he could muster, at Howard, grabbing Tyler's drawing from the table as Howard spun away and the book fell to the floor. He'd learned two things from the simple diversion. One, Howard didn't shoot first and ask questions later. And two, the man had a lot of fears rolling around inside his melon. He wondered which would be the easiest to trigger.

He ripped the placemat in half. "No drawing...no Iron Giant!"

"Oh, that b-word is still on the list!" Howard sneered as the crumpled halves of the drawing hit the floor. "But not tonight. Bigger fish."

"What? Are you gonna shoot me, Howard?" Dean asked, a bit disbelievingly. "You really want a body on your hands? Blood everywhere?"

"I'd shut up!" Howard shouted at him, his eyes widening. "'Cause I got lots of ways to take care of bullies, don't you worry," he continued, his chest rising and falling faster. "Like that FBI guy. He's your pal, right? I saw you chase Cliff down. Five minutes ago, his business card was torched. Along with something from my... personal collection."

Dean watched as he regained control of himself, picking up several drawings from the piles of pages on the stacked chairs next to him. "I – I – I picked it out real special for him, too."

The top drawing was of a clown. Kind of a hinky one, Dean thought, focussing on the image. Wouldn't matter to Sam, of course.

"Well, hey, these are, uh, really nice dolls. Did you paint them yourself?" Dean asked, picking up the wax figure of the clown. He had a bad feeling that Sam was already confronting his childhood fears and he needed a way to kibosh whatever spell Howard had already set into motion. "Oh. Uh, friggin' Plucky."

Howard's head jerked up. "Plucky helps kids. It's all I ever wanted to do. And when the management slot opened up, I... but they passed me over."

"Shocker," Dean remarked.

"No, I told them, 'No one cares more than me'," Howard insisted, taking another step closer to the fire. "But suits never listen."

Watching his gaze fall to the floor, Dean slid the clown into the back pocket of his jeans. Whatever had screwed the guy up so bad, he was willing to bet it was hanging on the wall with the other kids' drawings.

Howard looked up. "So, I'm doing it my way."

"So, let me get this straight. You didn't get the good parking space, so you start dropping bodies?" he asked mockingly.

"Those parents were horrible," Howard said, mouth curling down. "They deserved what they got."

"What about Saul?" Dean asked. "He deserve what he got?"

"Saul had a big mouth!"

"Some guy hits on the babysitter, all of a sudden he's the world's worst dad?"

"A good parent puts his kids first," Howard said, straightening up with self-righteous anger.

"And having a little girl watch her pop get ganked by the closet monster – that's putting her first?" Dean looked at him, one brow cocked. "You think that memory's gonna help her in life?"

"In the long run, they'll all be better off," Howard said, a bit less certainly.

Dean snorted. "You think so? Really?"

Looking away, Howard's voice dropped. "I would have been."

"So, your brother," Dean said, looking at the drawing and the photograph. "Older or younger?

"Older," Howard told him unwillingly. "Only eighteen months."

"What happened to him?"

His face twisted into a snarl, Howard suddenly shrieked, "It's not my fault! It's theirs!"

Ignoring the wildly waving gun, Dean kept his gaze on the drawing. "Looks to me like he drowned."

Howard's shoulders slumped, his frame seeming to shrink, as if someone had pulled a plug and all the air ran out of him. "I was screaming..." he said, almost whispering. "Screaming…but my folks...they didn't listen.

He looked up at Dean, his eyes filled with bitterness. "They _never_ listened."

"They didn't listen?" Dean asked, taking a half-step toward the brazier. "Or you froze?"

He understood that fear. It had been a shadow-tight companion throughout his life. Not being able to save Sammy. Not being able to protect him. He'd frozen just once and the repercussions from that moment still gave him nightmares, from time to time.

Howard stared at him, face pinched and white. "I couldn't – they were supposed to – I –"

"You blamed yourself," Dean said certainly. "It was an accident."

"NO!" Howard yelled. "They let him die!"

"You let him die," Dean corrected him softly, shaking his head. "But you were a kid, Howard…kids freeze up sometimes." He walked to the wall, looking at the drawing of the kid sinking through the water. "I'll bet you still have nightmares. In fact, I'll bet you haven't been in the water since."

"Shut up! Don't TOUCH that!"

Ignoring him, Dean pulled the drawing down, looking at it. "Because you're afraid. You're afraid it was your fault, not theirs."

"I couldn't swim as good as Davey," Howard admitted, almost to himself. "I –"

"You couldn't save him," Dean said flatly, pulling the clown figure out and wrapping the drawing around it. He tossed the drawing and doll onto the fire.

"NO!" Howard's voice rose to a high-pitched scream and he lurched toward the brazier, ducking away as the flames caught the paper and billowed out.

He turned the gun toward Dean and fired, the revolver cylinder turning three times as the bullets spat out. Dean threw himself across the room, his hand scrabbling for his gun as he hit the floor and rolled over.

Howard was standing still, staring at a little boy.

EMF meter would be off the scale, Dean thought irrelevantly, watching as the boy walked toward his brother. Howard made a bubbling noise and Dean's eyes widened slightly as water began to froth and spill from the man's mouth.

Had Davey called out to his brother, before he'd gone under, he wondered? Was that why Howard couldn't see it as an accident, something that wasn't his fault? Had he frozen up in shock and horror or had he waited too long, the remnants of some sibling fight holding him back?

"It wasn't my fault," Howard said, more water trickling from his nose. "I'm sorry."

Dean rolled onto his feet, a glance at the fire showing the paper almost ash and the clown a puddle of wax, spilling over the charcoal.

Howard's eyes rolled up and he jerked and flopped on the floor as water flowed out of his mouth and nose.

Sam was still alive, Dean thought, turning away. They both were. But if luck or fate or destiny took a hand and one of them died, it wouldn't sit on them. Sam was right. He was all grown-up, he didn't need a protector anymore. A partner, sure. But not a guardian.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Sam watched his brother laughing, open and free and from the gut, with a mild astonishment. The last time he'd seen Dean laugh like that…had been a long time ago, he thought. He hammed it up a little for him, liking the sound of Dean's laughter, liking the sight of his brother's eyes without the darkness that seemed to permanently haunt them.

"Dude…one of them sprayed me with seltzer from his flower," he ad-libbed earnestly and Dean turned away, eyes screwing shut as he tried to get some air.

His phone rang and Sam shook his coat, watching the glitter fall in drifts and flurries to the road as he tried to get it out without coating it in the stuff.

"Bobby? Yeah, we're both here," Sam said, smiling as he watched Dean wheeze and huff, leaning on the hood of the Cougar. "Hang on, I'll put you on speaker."

He put the phone on the hood and Bobby's voice blasted out of the speaker. "_Get back here, soon as you can._"

"What's going on?" Dean asked, sobering fast.

"_Frank got a number from Roman's network, thinks its coordinates_," Bobby said.

"_We got a sample of the additives from the Biggerson's food, Sam_," Lauren added, her voice holding an edge of worry. "_They're using modified enzymes to alter behaviour and genetic coding in the human body – _"

"_Dean, you need to call Cas_," Bobby cut in, his voice harsh. "_The quickest way we're gonna find out what they're doing is to talk to Therese._"

Looking at his brother's set expression, Sam realised that Dean had already prepared himself for the request.

"_I'm sorry –_"

"It's fine," Dean cut him off abruptly. "Take us a few hours to get back, Bobby. I'll call Cas from Jody's place."

He cut the call and shrugged, turning for the driver's door. "Leave the Jeep," he said over his shoulder.

Nodding, Sam walked around to the passenger door. "You alright with this?"

"No." Dean got into the car and started the engine. "But we've run out of other options."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	7. Chapter 7 Second Chance

**Chapter 7 Second Chance**

* * *

Dean turned off the headlights as the sky brightened beyond his brother's sleeping profile, lighting the fields to either side in shades of pewter and steel and iron. They'd be in Sioux Falls in another hour and he flexed his fingers around the steering wheel, feeling a disconcerting flutter in his stomach at the thought of calling the angel and asking for a ride.

For months he'd been investing time and effort in doing his best not to think of Terry. Had nearly drowned himself in booze to avoid the memories and the dreams that appeared with a regular monotony whenever he'd closed his eyes. Had thrown himself recklessly into hunts half-assed with the distant thought in the background that one time, his luck might run out and it would be over and he wouldn't have to keep fighting.

The idea that he could be talking to her again before nightfall today was much too unsettling to look at for long.

He swallowed hard and stared at the road and reminded himself impatiently that he was just going to talk. Nothing else. Just get whatever she had on what the writers on her show had seen of their world, their lives, and get back here. She'd made her position clear by asking Cas to take her back. There was no room for anything as fragile and uncertain as hope. Thinking of what Melanie had said to him, he wondered, more than a little bitterly, if he'd better off abandoning every shred of hope right here and now. Giving up what he wanted for the good of the world was already pretty goddamned old and stale and tired.

Every time he let his thoughts wind around to what might happen, sometime later today, he felt like a teenager. The teenage crush he'd never had, he thought, his lips curling down in self-derision. Only about twenty years late, but better late than never, right? He couldn't figure what Terry'd seen in him…and he couldn't bring himself to admit, even to himself, what he'd wanted to find in her.

Sioux Falls was seventy miles further up the road, the sign that zipped by reminded him. His leg ached slightly, not having given it enough time in the cast to heal up completely. He rubbed a hand along his thigh, a tear in the denim catching a thumbnail.

_I mean, you basically have been looking out for me your whole life. Now you finally get to take care of yourself. About time, huh?_

Dean blinked as his brother's words came back. Take care of yourself, he thought. Yeah, right. Well, he'd been seriously thinking about it back when he'd had something…someone…else to think about. Now, he couldn't see the point. It wasn't a second-chance kind of life. One person had walked in with a knowledge of what he'd done and who he'd been and what he and Sam had gone through. Just one that he didn't have to tell, didn't have to explain all the…all the everything.

_You could find another Becky_, a small, sarcastic voice in his head said slyly. _That'd be someone who'd know_.

The thought sent a deep, palsied shiver from the back of his neck down to his feet.

_No._ One person. In thirty-two years. The odds weren't looking great for that to happen again.

"Where are we?" Sam asked mushily, knuckling his eyes as he pushed himself higher in the passenger seat. "Crap, Dean, you should've woken me."

"S'okay," Dean said, sucking in a breath of relief as Sam's conscious presence pushed aside his sorry thoughts. "Not far, 'bout an hour."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"What – exactly – did Frank say?" Dean asked as he stretched back out in the armchair, fingers tickling the cold bottle of beer on the side table. He felt stiff and sore, not enough sleep, but wound up at the same time, those nervous knots still plucking at his insides. He wanted to put off the moment he had to call Cas for as long as possible.

"He got into a section of Roman's network, after you put us onto the Biggerson's outlets and the Midwest Meat & Poultry," Lauren said, sitting as close to Sam as she could. "There were files and files of building plans, he said."

"That, plus the analysis of the additives in the food they're serving at that place suggests that these guys are not playing penny ante," Bobby added, his toes wriggling in his socks as he extended them closer to the open fire on the hearth. "The behaviour modification isn't perfect yet, which is why you two found the glamper-eater, but they're working on it 'round the clock and sooner or later it will be. You know what the food production system is like, additives in absolutely everything. Most of the species is going to be as placid and docile as cows on morphine."

"Aside from the borax and decapitation, we haven't found anything that so much as slows those monsters down," Jody said, setting her wine glass down on the low table in front of the sofa and sitting next to Bobby. "As a one-by-one basis, getting rid of them all that way is gunna be a long, long process."

"Not to mention time-consuming," Bobby said. "We need a one-stop solution, and I'd prefer something that's actually within our capabilities."

Sam looked from him to Lauren. "Nothing else on the tablets or any other monster from Purgatory?"

"No," Lauren said, with a deeply rueful shake of her head. "Whatever their vulnerability is, and they have to have one, it's on the tablet about them and we don't know where that is, how to find it or even how to read it if we did, miraculously, come across it."

Dean stared at the flames in the fireplace. It all brought them to the point he was procrastinating on, he thought sourly. If the writers in her world hadn't screwed up, Terry would have seen some of the answers, at least. Would know some of how to get rid of these things. _I'm not going back to screw up her life_, he told himself. Just to ask. That's all. Just to ask…and see that she was okay. He nodded to himself and got up, walking out of the room and across the hall and through the dining room and kitchen to the back door.

It was clear and very cold outside, the starshine thin, a barely-there pale grey light that let him see enough to avoid running into anything. His breath was visible on every exhale and he pulled his coat collar up around his ears as he looked around.

"Cas? Earth to angel. Got your ears on, man?" he said softly, standing in the alleyway of piled cars past the workshop. "End of the line. I need a ride."

He wasn't sure if he was hoping for the angel to hear him or not.

The loose dirt of the dry yard swirled up and the alley filled with the faint sound of beating wings. He turned around, huffing out a white fog of breath as he looked at Castiel.

"I do not believe that this is a good idea," Cas said, his tone gruffly formal.

"You're not getting an argument from me," Dean told him with an uncaring shrug. "You got an alternative plan, lay it on me."

"There's still time –"

"No," Dean interrupted, his voice hard. "Time's what we don't have. The bigmouths are poisoning everybody with this mood-altering food crap and we don't even know if those people are going to turn back to normal, even if we nuke every last one of Dick's army." He looked back at the house. "We got no time left, Cas. We need answers now."

As the angel hesitated, Dean walked a little way down the alley. "How come the god-squad's got bupkis on these things anyway? I thought you guys had all the answers up there."

Cas examined his shoes. "No, not even close to 'all the answers'," he admitted ruefully. "The Leviathan are older than angel-kind –"

"But someone there had the low-down on them, Cas," Dean argued, turning around and looking at him. "Someone wrote those tablets."

"The Scribe disappeared two thousand years ago, Dean," Cas said with a deep sigh. "We looked – the archangels have been searching for Metatron for all of that time and have never found him."

Dean made a disbelieving face. "You need those kiddie-locators to keep track of your own?"

Cas thought about that for a moment, then nodded in agreement. "Apparently."

"Well, this is like, Plan F, and we ain't got a Plan G…so, fire up your wings."

"We could lead them to her world –"

Dean let out a soft snort, repressing his fears about that very thing. "Cas, we've been through this before. No other options. Let's go."

The angel looked…guilty, Dean thought as Cas stepped close and lifted his hand. Guilty and pissed, he amended, looking at his expression. Like he'd been found out in another deception or evasion. That was all the thought he had time for as blackness descended, snuffing out breath and sensation and leaving him hanging alone in the nothing for long, long moments.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

His knees popped loudly when air and light and sound and smell returned, assailing him on every level. Dean opened his eyes cautiously and looked around.

"This it?" he asked the angel. Cas nodded.

They were standing on a street not more than a block or two from some main thoroughfare, he thought, hearing the rush and hum of the traffic under the patter of the steady rain that was soaking them. Turning around, he saw a nondescript apartment building rising behind them and he hurried to the shelter of the entryway, hitting a buzzer at random. The front door clicked open without a query from the intercom, and he pushed it wide, looking for the mailboxes.

_Therese E. Alcott. _

Printed, right there, on the box. Putting an eye to the dark slit at the top he could just make out a few letters inside it.

_Apartment 4D._

He started up the stairs, looking around curiously as he climbed, hearing the angel's heavy thumping tread behind him. It was clean, he thought, tidy. Not low-rent but somewhere in the middle. No weird smells. No arguments or TV too loud behind any of the doors. He looked down at his watch and swore under his breath when he saw that it'd stopped.

"Are…there, um, any time differences here from home?" he asked Cas in a low voice.

Cas shook his head. "It's precisely the same time and date here as it was when we left your world's plane."

Friday night then, sometime past eight. He stopped at the green-painted door of Apartment 4D and made himself knock on it.

Nothing happened.

He knocked again, louder this time, and waited. The door, and the apartment beyond it, remained silent and barred to him. He remembered Terry telling him how late she'd worked some nights and he pulled out his picks, setting them into the simple lock and opening it. The apartment was dark and slightly sterile-smelling, like no one lived here.

Reaching around the doorjamb, his fingers found the light switch and he flicked it on. The apartment wasn't large. A very short hall held a slatted closet door and on the opposite wall, a mirror. Beyond that, the little hall opened into a living room, painted white on three of the walls, a deep gold on the fourth. The kitchen was only little more than an alcove, separated from the living room by a long counter. On the other side of the comfortable but characterless room, a pair of glass-paned doors were closed, sheer curtains hiding the details of the room they gave entrance to, but he guessed, her bedroom, with a bathroom off it.

Two of the white-painted walls were almost hidden behind pale gold, timber bookshelves, adding colour and texture to the room with their countless volumes of paperbacks and hardbacks, all kinds of books, large and small. A small, floral-print sofa and two solid-coloured armchairs took up the centre of the room, with a dining table that might just seat four at a pinch in the corner between the end of the kitchen counter and the apartment's floor to ceiling windows. In between two of the windows, an old-fashioned rolltop desk held a laptop and a small printer. As he scanned the place, he thought most of the furniture in it had come with the rental. The desk was the only odd piece out in the room.

He put the picks away and prowled around the living room, glancing randomly at the titles of the books, opening the cupboard doors beneath the higher shelving. In the cupboard next to the TV, he saw something pushed right to the back, and knelt down, reaching in to pull out the rectangular box. The title leapt out at him, and he looked from the air-brushed renditions of him and Sam – or their physical doubles in this world – and back to the cupboard, returning the boxed set of DVDs slowly. They'd been shoved back there for a reason, he told himself, closing the door and standing up. Out of sight, out of mind. He wondered uneasily if she was still working for the show. If she wasn't, it meant the trip was going to net them a fat donut for their effort. Except that he would see her, the thought fluttering his stomach again.

Chuck's books weren't there and he belatedly reminded himself that the prophet had only existed in his world. There were too many damned versions of his life, he thought uncomfortably, swinging around to investigate the kitchen.

Opening the fridge door and peering inside, then the kitchen cupboards, he wondered what the hell Terry had been living on. A withered apple was the only thing fridge had contained and the neatly arranged but dusty plates and glasses had obviously remained unused for some time. On the front of the fridge a magnetic calendar held a number of entries hastily scribbled in a fine whiteboard marker ink. He noted that tonight there was a note to meet D.F. at 6.30. On the wall above the window, a cheap, round-faced clock showed that it was now eight-ten p.m. He turned away and walked to the desk.

Piled to one side of the laptop, there were a dozen or more books. He looked at the top one, lying open to a page and closed it. The title was '_H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography_'. He moved it aside. Under it was another book about the horror writer, '_The Trail of Cthulu_'. Beneath that, a plain medical-style text book with the title of '_The Psychology of Torture'. _ Dean's brows drew together as he read that. Not even close to light reading. Pushing it to one side, the last two on the stack were Dante's '_Purgatorio_', and Lovecraft's '_Necronomicron_'.

He shook his head slightly. Why the hell had she been reading this stuff? Here? Hiding the boxset and reading about monsters and Purgatory? He felt as if he should know why, but he couldn't imagine a reason for her to do either. That wasn't quite right. He could imagine the reasons. He couldn't believe them.

Looking around the apartment, he couldn't see the woman he thought he'd known. It was her place, undoubtedly, he thought, looking back at the books on the desk. But aside from what seemed to be a wide-ranging taste in fiction, it held very little of the few things he knew about her. No photographs or knick-knacks cluttered the shelves or tables. No flowers in vases. The furniture and the soft furnishings were decidedly utilitarian. Where the hell was the woman who'd gotten married for the sex and lost her parents as a child and had told him he was kidding himself about what he'd done in the pit?

He looked at the clock in the kitchen again. And literally, where the hell was she? The hands now pointed to the nine and the one.

He walked to the glass doors, pushing them open. The bedroom was small, a queen-sized bed taking up most of the available floor space. Recessed into the common wall between apartments, a full-length built-in closet, with the same slatted doors as the hall closet, faced him. The bathroom door was ajar to his left. The bed was under the windows to his right. He turned on the lights and walked in, seeing a familiar leather folder sitting on the nightstand next to a reading lamp.

It wasn't as full as her old one had been, he thought, the one still in her room at Bobby's, waiting fruitlessly for her. Bobby hadn't explained why he hadn't taken out her stuff, just shrugging and turning away when he'd asked. The old man had been fond of her, he knew. Terry had managed to find a way into all of their hearts, in one way or another, despite her not-very-inspiring start in their world.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he reached for the folder. Typed pages, handwritten notes, rough diagrams of sets and several folded up maps filled it. At the back, a notebook of lined pages was tucked into a pocket and he pulled it out, opening it randomly.

_Do these people even know the characters?!_ The first line almost yelled at him, the pen's tip had been pushed hard into the paper and the familiar slanted handwriting made his mouth twitch involuntarily to one side. She was a note-taker, she'd told him, sometime when they'd been talking about nothing much. That's what she did, how she got it all to make sense. He missed just shooting the breeze with her, he realised slowly, as her voice muttered and yelled and murmured from the pages. Missed too many things.

_Day four, shooting and once again the plot has been sketched in with no explanations for how they're getting around the country (rocket-powered cars?) in such short time frames. No explanation of Dean's deepening depression once he tells Sam about Amy. No explanations of what Frank's doing. Arrgh. Forget it. None of this is probably happening anyway._

He turned the page, skimming over the contents. Most of it was similar, short-lived rants against something or another. He could almost hear her saying them out loud, her tone impatient and snappy.

_Karen's developed dementia, I swear. Three times she's forgotten about the schedule and told me I haven't finished the scripts and three times I've handed copies to her. Flying to LA tomorrow to get next batch and do the pre-plan schedule for the Seattle episode and Coeur d'Alene._

_Of course the pony won't run head first into a fence!? What's WRONG with these people. Cut away shot, yeah, right, duh._

_Googled Karen's friend's brother. Seems okay. Friday's a dog's breakfast anyway, maybe it'll provide some light relief._

He closed the notebook and stood up. There was a single photograph in the room, a portrait of a family. He walked around the bed to it, picking it up and studying the man and the woman who smiled blithely into the camera, their gap-toothed young daughter standing in front of them, curly hair subdued into braids. Her eyes were the same, he thought, lifting the frame closer. A blue-green lined in a darker shade of blue, filled with flecks and half-shadowed by long, thick eyelashes. The family had had no idea that it would all be wrecked soon. Terry had told him she'd been nine when her parents had died. She looked about eight or nine in the picture.

He put the photo down and went into the bathroom, turning the cold tap on and filling his hands with water, dunking his face into it. When he came up for air, he looked at the dripping face in the mirror, droplets hanging from his lashes. _I don't even know what the hell I'm feeling_, he admitted to himself, closing his eyes and shutting out the image of his reflection.

He wanted to tell the angel in the next room to take a hike, go find something else to do for a few hours, wait and…what? Talk to her? Kiss her? Rip her friggin' clothes off and wrap himself around her, bury himself deep inside her…he sucked in a deep breath at the mental image, a flush of heat washing over him, it was so strong. He hadn't told her, in words, how it'd felt to him to wake up in the morning with her lying next to him. He hadn't told her how it felt when she was around, to talk to, to listen to, to watch.

Straightening, he wiped a hand over his face and reached for the towel hanging behind the door. As he dried his face, the scent – _her _scent – filled him and he leaned against the vanity, face buried in the towel, memory pushing out thought and reason, his breathing raggedly loud in the tiled room.

She'd _left_, he said to himself, returning the towel to the rail through an act of iron willpower. _Of her own choice_. She'd asked Cas to take her home and that was a good thing. She could be safe here. Have a normal life here. Far away from him and all the monsters and fates and world-ending freakin' catastrophes that hounded him and his brother. Besides, he acknowledged with a sour laugh, Cas was agitated enough being here, he wouldn't leave.

Walking back out into the bedroom, the shrill ring of the phone made him startle and he looked around for the handset. An answering machine caught the call before he could, the sharp beep loud in the silent apartment.

"_Terry, it's Karen, just calling to see how the date went and what you think of David_," a woman's voice brayed on the machine. "Don't_ keep me in suspense_."

Another beep signalled the end of the call and Dean stood there, staring at the machine for a few moments. A date? That's where she was? On a date? The thought wouldn't get out of his head and he stared blankly at the bedroom wall for several minutes, unable to even move.

"Dean, are you okay?" Cas said from the doorway.

He looked around at the angel, frowning as he realised he'd been standing in the bedroom, staring at nothing. "Yeah."

"Uh, I didn't realise this would take so long –"

"She's on a date," Dean said, his tone carefully neutral as he glanced up at the kitchen clock. Nine-twenty. "We could be here for a while. Make yourself comfortable."

He walked past the angel and dropped into an armchair, staring at the opposite wall. A_ date_. With Karen's friend's brother presumably, he thought, remembering the notation in her book. Who seemed 'okay'.

His chest was tight and his hands were aching, and he looked down to see them curled into fists. Unclenching them and shaking his fingers a bit, he wondered what the hell had possessed him to make this trip with Cas. Sam would've done it. Would've come and asked and gone back none the worse. How'd he kidded himself that this would be a good thing? How'd he imagined that he could ask her anything? She had a whole friggin' life here that he knew hardly anything about.

He wanted a drink. Double. Neat. No, make it a triple. Just leave the damned bottle.

"Maybe we should just leave?" Cas suggested tentatively. "If you think that she might not come back for some time? Dates sometimes last all night, isn't that correct?"

Dean killed the image the angel's question raised before it had a chance to fully form. It was true. Dates, successful dates, could last all night. He hadn't even asked her on a date. Dating was something for normal lives. Normal people.

"No." He decided that the word covered all of Cas' need-to-know questions.

"The conjunction between the planes doesn't last all that long, Dean, we could be trapped –"

Dean scowled at him. Was it impossible for the angel to see that he didn't give a freakin' rat's ass about the conjunctions? "Which part of 'no', are you having trouble with, Cas?"

"It doesn't further our cause to become –"

The paperweight on the side table next to the chair was a glass ball and his hand curled around it without thought. He didn't aim it at the angel, he threw it at the opposite wall where it exploded in a shower of shattered glass fragments and left a deep divot in the wall.

Cas looked at the mess on the floor and moved a few steps further from Dean.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The seconds ticked by incrementally, the minute hand of the clock dragging its way around the face with agonising slowness.

He heard the car at five minutes past ten, almost catapulting from the chair and going to the window. A silver late-model Mercedes sat by the kerb, purring to itself, and Dean pressed closer to the glass, trying to see straight down as the engine was stopped and the doors opened. Terry got out, and Dean left a big smeary, fogged breath on the window as she looked around, lifting her head for a moment. Her hair was longer, he thought. The dress looked good on her. He didn't think he'd seen her in a dress. Ever. She turned her head to look over the car's roof.

The friend's brother, he thought, watching a tall, blond guy get out and hurry around the front of the car. He swore, his breath leaving another heavy fogged patch on the window pane as he realised that the guy wasn't coming back, was obviously on his way up the stairs with Terry right this friggin' minute.

Did he need this, he asked himself furiously, crossing back to the chair and dropping into it. Did he need the constant reminders? Or the aggravation? Or the angel standing there, his face completely expressionless. No. No, he didn't.

Their voices were hardly audible through the door, and he hunched back in the chair as he heard the key turn in the lock.

"…aren't such a good night for me," Terry's voice came clear as the door opened. Dean thought she sounded tired and flat. "Work's been frantic these last couple of weeks."

"How about Saturday night then? Next week? Something relaxing?" the guy's voice was light, casual, Dean thought, but he could hear the determination underneath. There was a I-get-you're-not-totally-into-me-right-now-but-I'm-totally-into-you tone to it. Terry had done something to the dude, in spite of her less-than-enthusiastic attitude.

"Uh, um…sure," Terry said, and Dean felt his stomach flop over. He savagely suppressed his instinctive reaction and gripped the arms of the chair with both hands. "Give me a call."

"I will," the guy said. His voice was lower when he added, "I enjoyed tonight, Terry."

The drop in volume suggested intimacy and Dean closed his eyes and hummed under his breath, trying to block out the visual of the blond guy leaning closer…kissing her…

"Thank you, goodnight."

He heard the door close, the lock snick into place and opened his eyes as Terry took a step into the room and froze, her attention locked onto the angel standing by her sofa.

Getting up, he watched her warily as she turned to him. The dress did look good. And her hair was longer, curls framing her face. She was thinner, he thought distractedly, her eyes looked huge. For a second, when her eyes met his, he saw past her disbelief and behind her astonishment, to something else. Some kind of emotion that his brother had told him about and that he hadn't let himself believe in.

The reality of the situation dropped back onto him when she didn't move, didn't even take a step toward him. Maybe she had, he thought, his walls snapping back into place self-defensively, but she'd made her choice and she was living her life and there was definitely no room for him here.

"Hey, Dorothy."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**AN:**__ I hope this read okay. Third person is a lot different to first and some parts were harder than I thought they'd be! This should continue straight into the end of Chapter 23 of _Crossing Over_. I have to admit that this story has definitely outed me as a hopeless romantic, hope you had fun! __By the way, just because the story's completed doesn't mean that I don't want to hear what you thought of it! If you enjoyed this tale, let me know, writers crave feedback!_  



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